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Website Development & Hosting

The growth in web-based applications, e-commerce, and personalisation often means that each

page view must be computed on the fly. As a result, the experienced delay in loading the page

is determined not simply by the download delay (bad as it is) but also by the server performance.

Sometimes building a page also involves connections to back-end mainframes or database servers,

slowing down the process even further. Users do not care why response times are slow. All they

know is that the site does not offer good service: slow response times often translate directly into

a reduced level of trust and they always cause a loss of traffic as users take their business

elsewhere.  So  invest  in  a  fast  server  and  get  a  performance  expert  to  review  your  system

architecture and code quality to optimise response times. 

19. Anything that Looks Like Advertising

Selective attention is very powerful, and web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads

that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation.

Unfortunately,  users  also  ignore  legitimate  design  elements  that  look  like  prevalent  forms  of

advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don t study it in detail to find out what it is.

Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements.

20. Prioritise: Good Content Bubbles to the Top

If  everything  is  equally  prominent,  then  nothing is  prominent.  It  is  the  job  of  the  designer  to

advise the users and guide them to the most important or most promising choices (while

ensuring their freedom to go anywhere they please). 

On  today s  web,  the  most  common  mistake  is  to  make  everything  too  prominent:  over-use  of

colours,  animation,  blinking,  and  graphics.  Every  element  of  the  page  screams,   look  at  me 

(while  all  the  other  design  elements  scream   no,  look  at  me ).  When  everything  is

emphasised, nothing is emphasised.

But it s just as bad to make everything equally bland. 

Here are some ways of using prioritisation to guide users: 

a

Editorially  select the  most  important  stories  or  items.  Give  them  bigger  headlines  or

more prominent placement   an old principle that newspapers have used for more than

100 years. 

a

Use sales statistics to discover the best-selling products and place them on top of search

listings. By definition, most customers will be looking for the best-sellers. It is user-hostile

to  bury  them  in  a  search  listing  that  is  organised  by  some  impenetrable  information

retrieval  algorithm  (or  worse:  sorted  by  SKU  numbers  or  other  internal  attributes  that

don t matter to users).

a

Use server traffic to track areas of the site that are seeing unusually strong activity and

place links to these areas on the homepage. Not only will you save users clicks, you will

also make people aware of the current buzz. 

Copyright  NESIS 2002

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