Pay Attention when Planning

I ran accross this article today on 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website which is a rather obvious list, but like many obvious lists it bears attention because often people get a little too involved in the task at hand and forget the basics.

One point I rather disagree with is #2 which talks to spending time on Design first and paying close attention to copy. Not that these things are not important, but a strong visual design is of grand importance only when dealing with specific niches. Design focuses should initially be placed on usability, accessibility, and search engine optomization in my opinion so that those features are in place for future redesign efforts. A pretty picture or two livens up a site, but too much effort can be expended on designs that are not very innovative and are appreciated only by a small subsection of the intended audience.

Copy is of course paramount, but there is little scientific information in regards to what makes good copy. I have analyzed my own sites and found that my extensive utilization of multi-sylabbic (and often misspelled :)) prose is apparently frowned upon because mass audiences prefer to read articles at a 9th or 10th grade level. Bah Humbug! The way I see it, write what you want to write and in a manner in which you yourself would enjoy and likely others will follow.

Another topic that was brought up is planning for scalability. This is something that is way too often overlooked and largely ignored by every web development platform that is out there. Too many people think about scalability in terms of hardware and not enough in terms of software design. Little things like combining and compressing your javascript and CSS files and tagging them for cache within browsers that don't automatically do so are vital to pay attention to. Most webmasters have broadband access and have no idea how long it takes for sites to load on a 33.6 modem. As well, many authentication mechanisms that exist out there in the wild make it extremely difficult to migrate to load-balanced or geographically disparate balancing of network traffic. More than once, spawning sites have died because of their lack of ability to handle large traffic surges without a serious investment in programming efforts.

If you can only focus on one particular aspect mentioned in the article, it should be ease of use. Send family members to your website - you know, the ones who don't use the internet very often - and watch them interact with it. See if they can find those nifty features you've built in to it. See if they recognize and utilize your navigation mechanism. See if they pay attention to your revenue generation resources. If they have trouble with your site, think about a redesign or putting in place some online tutorials for site usage.

There are a lot of pieces of advice out there for building the next great site. My own set of advice would be to innovate, respond to your community, and participate in similar communities. Plan growth during periods when you can produce fast results to growing pains. Even if you can only respond with "I cannot improve this feature at the moment" - at least the community gets a feel for the fact that you are working towards improvement.