There are websites that make you want to stay and visit for awhile and there are websites that you don’t. We’ve all visited both, but have you thought about why some websites just seem to work better than others?
Cookbook sites are a perfect example. When you visit one cookbook site, you find yourself lingering and browsing for more books long after you’ve found the one you want. On another site, you may not even bother looking for your book. Look at the differences for clues about how to design a site that works.
There is a cookbook for everything. There are cookbooks for ethnic foods, cookbooks for dieters, cookbooks for meat lovers and cookbooks for vegetarians. There must be thousands of topics to choose from. When someone goes to a website for the first time, they are not going to stay for a long time.
A good webmaster knows this. His homepage is going to be light on text. It is going to get to the point within a couple of short paragraphs. He wants the readers to be drawn immediately to the cookbook they’re looking for, so the emphasis on the homepage will be on the index.
Everything will be catalogued in such a way that the viewer knows within seconds exactly where to go to find the book they’re looking for. If they want cake decorating books, they will see a tab or link that makes them feel confident they will find it quickly if they click on that link. If they want to find a new Mexican recipe, the homepage should make it possible for them to find a link to that general category within seconds.
The website that you run from will make you scroll down the page while they explain in detail why their website is so wonderful. When you want to know how to decorate cake, you don’t want to have to scroll down a sidebar that lists each title in alphabetical order and hope to find one that sounds like it might be about what you’re looking for. On the homepage, this is a very bad idea. Keep it short and categorize your offerings.
Almost every website with a number of products has a search facility. However, this should not be thought of as a replacement for a well designed homepage. The visitor hasn’t come to a search engine – a search engine has already directed them to the site. If they typed ‘cake decorating designs‘ once in google, they don’t want to do it again on your site. Also, while you want to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, you also want them to notice other books while you’ve got their attention.
An eye catching design, short and concise content and an easy to navigate site are the three basic ingredients to good web design. These will keep them on the page and keep them coming back for more.