Have you ever gone to a website that featured something you were really interested in -- only to become lost the moment you started clicking around? Or even when you first landed on the page? That is usually the site of someone who maybe spent a lot of time and/or money on utilizing the latest technology, but forgot one of the most important rules: make sure you have a userfriendly webdesign.
The importance of userfriendly webdesign cannot be overstated. Visitors to a site like to be able find what they need quickly and painlessly. Those who become entangled in a morass of links and pages that are not easy to interpret or navigate, or "under construction" pages, or anything that ruins their visit may leave in frustration and never return. This, of course, is bad for your business, your promotional site, or even just your personal page. If people are coming to your site but are not staying, or are not purchasing your product, some of the fault may lie in how the pages are designed.
Perhaps a more familiar way to think about the design of a site, and how it should flow, is to imagine your site as your home or office that you wish people to visit. When some people decorate their homes or plan for an occasion, top in their minds is the impression people get when they walk into a room, and how the rooms flow, particularly if there is a party or some other event with lots of people. Can visitors get from one place to another easily, without bumping against the furniture, taking lots of detours or getting lost completely? Is there coherence in the design, making it simple for those unfamiliar with the home to gain an impression of who the owners are, and what is important to them?
The same thing applies to making your website. A userfriendly webdesign takes the user into consideration first. If removing this flashing thing, and that talking thing improves the user's experience on the site, then get rid of it, no matter how cool it may be. The user -- your customers, your readers, people who just drop by -- must come first if you want your site to be a success.
When you are looking into getting your site designed or redesigned, talk to the designer about this. Tell them what you need, who your likely visitors will be, your target market -- all of it. And then let them tell you what they can do for you. If customer experience is not at the top of their list, you might want to keep looking. This is not to say that they will not know how to effectively design your site, and to do a userfriendly design, but you want to make sure that that is at the forefront of everything they do when designing your site.
A good idea is to do a test run before you open your site to the public. Get a few people with varying levels of experience online and have them go through and start clicking. If the most inexperienced are puzzled at how to get from one place to another, or to order a product, or do whatever it is your site wants them to do, then it's time to rethink the design and how to make it more userfriendly.