Recommendations for Web Site Design

After looking at over 50,000 manufacturer's web sites while developing 4specs, I have a few recommendations. Read my list and decide if they can be applied to your website?

• Make your Site useful to the architect and specifier
  • Use the WebFormat navigation system we developed.
  • Design your site so an experienced architect or specifier could complete his design on a Saturday afternoon using just information available on your web site. Include all the information contained in your library binder.
    • Selection guide for your products to guide in the selection of the products to be included
    • 3-part CSI-formatted specification
    • product data sheets
    • dimensions and CAD details where appropriate
    • Frequently Asked Questions to help understand how to use and specify the products.
    • List of competitive materials. Done politely, this can be a very useful design tool to help the professional know what materials should be specified as "or equal" and the differences between products.
  • Provide a phone number, postal address and fax on every page.
  • Provide a working Email address, and respond to inquiries in 4 working hours. Some manufacturers provide no Email address on the website and require a form to be filled out.  In some cases, all fields must be filled in to send the form. This is frustrating. Why make it difficult for an architect to use your information.
• Make your Site fast and easy to use
  • Eliminate Splash Pages - this is an introduction page that has no information, generally just a large image. You either click on the image or wait for the next page. The worst examples have 2-4 splash pages, one after another, all while the visitor waits.
  • Provide a professional entry page easily accessed from your home page and to be used by directories such as 4specs.com. This would be the summary product page proposed in WebFormat.
  • Eliminate frames. Here are two reasons why you should not use frames:
    • search engines do not properly search frames, especially on the home page. I expect that you want search engines to list your site's key words.
    • It is very difficult to print pages from framed sites. I expect that you want architects to print your data pages and include the pages in the project design documentation.
  • No large images on the home page. We have seen many images that exceed 50,000 bytes and take 20 seconds to load. This is especially true for image maps. Worse yet, if the image is not sized, the browser will not display anything until the entire image is downloaded.
  • The site requires a special plugins such as shockwave or the site is not usable.
  • Audio! What can this possibly add to a business to business site?
  • Java is mandatory to use the site. Java takes 15 seconds to load on my machine and is an annoyance while I wait. In many cases the Java just provides special image animation and adds nothing of value to the design professional.
  • Manufacturers who do not use their domain name as an Email address. No one explained to them that their ISP should maintain a mailbox for them under their  domain name and that mailbox can be accessed from any Internet dial-up, including an AOL dialup. AOL does not use standard Email protocols and is not always compatible with the rest of the universe. An Email address such as manufacturer @ aol.com is simply not as business like as jbaldwin @ mycompany.com
  • More than 2-4 graphics on the home page. Some sites have 30-40 graphics!! This takes time to load. Often the manufacturer is unaware of the annoyance as the graphics are already available on their machine in their browser's cache and they have no idea that an outside visitor gets annoyed at the delays. Worse yet, the architect or specifier may leave the site before getting the information and go to a competitor's Internet web site and use their specs and details.
  • Sites not usable for all browser widths or request or require you to set the width. 4specs.com is designed on a 800x640 screen and is frequently checked at 640x480 resolution to make certain that nothing strange happens.
  • The home page is a large table. Your designer used tables to rigidly control the page visuals. But, no information is displayed to the visitor until the entire table has been loaded. We recommend that you split the table into 2 or more tables so the part visible when the page is first loaded is more quickly displayed. I demonstrate this concept in our article Developing A Construction Web Site. The article is split into two tables to more rapidly show the visible part, while the rest of the page/table is loading. You may also want to preload some large graphics at the bottom of the home page that will be used on other pages expected to be loaded.
  • Rollovers and other mouse actions - this is where the screen changes when the mouse cursor passes over the object. Looks cool, but takes a lot of unneeded code, and slows down the page.