Make no doubt about it—it is incredibly easy to become caught up in all kinds of endless features and frills when developing or redeveloping a website. For complex site designs, the sky is the limit on what can be accomplished by expert professional website designers and programmers. But regardless of how complex a site’s depth will be, ultimately one thing holds true throughout—KISS.
What Does KISS Mean?
Simple – KISS is an acronym that stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Sure it’s kind of crude, but it’s also incredibly relevant when it comes to web design (and just catchy enough to remember all the while).
What Is Important To Effective And Successful Web Design?
Following the simplistic strategy of KISS, there are several effective and highly successful components of web design that should be the focus. Going too far beyond the proven effective design strategies not only requires more time, effort, and expense, but it often even has a negative effect on site appeal. Let’s take a look at the KISS site basics:
Quality Content. Well organized, optimized, and lots of it! A website’s content is the most important feature used to attract visitors. After all, they’re searching for something and someone must provide it. The rest of the site could even be just a plain background with simple navigation and little else—it doesn’t matter how simple it is, great content will still shine through.
Simple Navigation. Making sure visitors can easily get around the website is another highly important KISS practicality. Showy, multi-level menu navigation systems are nice and all, but sometimes plain and prominently placed text links to logical and relevant next areas of the site are even more effective for both visitors and search engine friendliness.
Blog Component. Having a blog on the site is perfect for updates and news for a company organization. It’s also a great way to enable easy to edit and update functionality for practically anyone, regardless of technical aptitude. Using a blog keeps the rest of the static portion of the site intact and well organized while still enabling those spontaneous additions from time to time.
Appealing Graphic Design. Remember, a simple site is almost always more effective and functional than a site that just goes over the top. The graphic design components of a website are certainly no exception to this rule. While it’s sometimes tempting to add lots of different images, fonts, and colors, it’s also very true that doing exactly this often creates mass confusion and distraction to both human web visitors and the “robots” that the search engines send by to analyze and rate the site.
A great web design can have these features (and these features alone), and still do just great with both search and in the eyes of visitors and customers. Remember to KISS!
Comments