Daily Do’s and Don’t’s

Alas, my job doesn’t afford me too many opportunities to further myself professionally, stretch my analytic skills or otherwise tax my brainpower in any particularly useful way.

However, any given day will see me surfing through at least a dozen websites that I’ve never laid eyes on before. As a professional web surfer, I’m all business: I know what information I’m looking for before a page even loads, and I want to make a surgical strike to retrieve it in the fewest minutes and clicks possible and then be on my merry way.

So I’m probably not going to marvel at your lush graphics, and I’m certainly not going to sit through your cinematic flash intro—with its full streaming stereo sound and as many pulsing spinning things as you can cram into my browser window. Paul Boag of Boagworld.com disdains flash in general and flash intros in particular, and the more flash I see, the more I agree. “SIT STILL, DAMMIT, YOU’RE ABOUT TO HAVE A MULTIMEDIA EXPERIENCE AND YOU’RE GOING TO LIKE IT, TOO!!!”—is what most flash intros say (scream!) to me, and they tend to bias me against a website. Especially if the programmer doesn’t provide me with an immediately accessible opt-out link.

But my opinions of websites don’t begin and end with my dislike of flash: as a user, I will appreciate it if your website has things like sensible section headings, a search box, contact info, and (depending on the number of pages and type of content) maybe a calendar, a FAQ, and plenty of internal links to get me from one place on your site to another without having to retrace my steps back to your homepage every time.

I’ve been taking notes as I make my way through the bayous and back alleys of the internet these last few months, and I though I might begin to share some of them. Today’s entry was inspired by a recent quest to hunt down a particular children’s theater event at the Del E. Webb Center, a music and theatre complex in Wickenburg, Arizona. It can be found here.

Here’s the first thing you see when you hit the site:


Nice page. Pretty. All right, down to work. Now where is that darn search box….

::hunt, hunt, hunt::

Oh! Here! Wait…




Oh-ho! Masquerading as headings, are we? How clever! Splendid, well now that I’ve cleared out that confusingly bold placeholder text, I’ll just plug my SEARCH term into the search box…oops.



Now tell me: which is which? One is meant for to take an email address and the other is meant to take search text, but as you can see, they’re indistinguishable once I clear out the big, bold placeholder text. Here’s a question: why not put “Search” above one and “Mailing List” over the other? Even better, put the two boxes on different parts of the page. Best, to remove any last possible source of confusion, color the inside of the text fields white, so they don’t camouflage with the background elements quite so well.


Lesson:

1) If you’re going to use placeholder text in your site’s text fields, just go crazy and make it gray against a white background. This will help you text boxes stand out from the rest of the stuff on the page, and be less confusing in general.

2) Don’t have the placeholder text be the ONLY thing proclaiming your search box’s function. Search boxes are a critical tool—place them prominently. Certain of your visitors will use on a regular basis and almost ALL of them will expect nowadays. It may be one of the first things a new user looks for when he lands on your site (especially when you’re a site with a wealth of frequently-updated, event-specific information like Del E. Webb. People are mostly there to get specific information and get out, rather than to idly surf, read something, buy something, look at some nice pictures, appreciate your subtle synergy of fonts and shading…)

3) Separate text fields with different functions. Search boxes should have pride of place; they’re used a broad swath of the visiting public to find specific info on your site. Mailing list signup fields are only used by a small fraction of your visitors who like what you do so much that they want to be kept up to speed on everything that goes on in your little world. As much as you’d like to think that everyone who visits your site will like what you’ve got so much that they’ll want you showing up in their inbox bi-weekly…brother, it just isn’t so.