Do you sincerely want to be read?

I love the visual side of design. And, like everyone, I am attracted to visually appealing sites. However, even if I have some visual ideas which really excite me, I do not work on them when I am first designing a site. The most important first step, I would argue, is to work out how the site could best be structured. Before visual design comes site design.

Two books which I have found really helpful in this area are Marc Campbell’s Web Design Garage (Prentice Hall, 2005)—see especially ‘Chapter 1. Designing to Aid Navigation’, and Jeff Johnson’s Web Bloopers ( Morgan Kaufmann, 2003)—see especially ‘Chapter 3. Navigation Bloopers’. Johnson also has an online checklist of bloopers, which every Web designer should download.

I’ve recently been struck again by how important this design stage is, because I’m designing a site for a dental clinic, and my client pointed me to half a dozen existing dental sites which impressed him.

Visually, some of them impressed me too. There was some elegant design, and the Flash animations were under control. But in every case the site design was so arbitrary that even if a visitor knew what she or he wanted from the site, they would have been stumped to find it. And the wares which should have been on display were often hidden out of sight. So I had to ask the question at the head of this post: do you sincerely want to be read?

I had thought of listing the sites here, but it seems a touch unfair. If any reader of this blog wants them, of course, I’ll post them in a reply to a comment.

So how do you design a whole site?

There are no hard and fast rules for site design. But here’s one thing I sometimes do—and did for the dental clinic site. I put the title of every possible site page onto an index card (there were over 70 ;-) ) and then I tried various groupings, until I found one I liked enough to present to the client for approval.

For me, the final decision is not just a matter of common sense or logic—though both help. You also have to put yourself in the shoes of site visitors. You have to show off the site to best effect. In the case of the clinic site, there were pages about treatments such as root canal work, and pages about conditions such as bad breath. I didn’t want any of this stuff to put off visitors who were looking for something else. So I put all those pages into a section called “Answers to Questions”, where I also put stuff about fees and payment plans.

I made sure all the main sections—the ones which appeared in the top-level menu—came across as positive. So cosmetic dentistry features immediately—in a section called “Our Services”—but, while you can find information about tooth decay easily, you don’t get presented with it on the home page.

I’ll post to this blog when the site is up and running. Watch this space!