Archive for August, 2006

Often clients ask us about putting links to external sites on their pages. This is an important question that should be given a lot of consideration since a lot of money can be made or lost depending on the decision. This article seeks to help you understand how to figure out whether putting links on your pages will be a net benefit or loss.

Every link – whether a text link, image link, or banner advertisement – is a doorway. As such, every link leading away from your pages is a potential to lose users. Losing users is losing money. However, there are certain benefits to putting links to external web sites on your own pages. If there were no benefits to doing so, no web site would have external links and the World Wide Web would not be a web but rather a collection of unconnected nodes.

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When starting a web development project, there are many advantages to hiring a user experience architect first. The most important of these are:

1. to ensure a usable product that matches the goals of your company
2. to obtain a definitions guide which can protect against scope creep, synchronize efforts and protect against costly revisions
3. to acquire accurate estimates for project development by providing detailed and unambiguous specifications

Ensure a usable product that matches the goals of your company and reduces support costs

By hiring a web developer first, the process of refining features to address the users’ and company’s goals can be missed entirely, giving less attention for the sake of feature development, and even postponement until integration of usability efforts is much more difficult and less effective. Unlike web developers, user experience architects specialize in evaluating user behavior and task analysis which is invaluable in creating sites with which people can feel accomplished and can enjoy interacting.

Although, a web developer will produce a functional solution, without the expertise of the user experience architect, the result may not be an effective solution; that is to say, it may work technically but your users may not be able to easily accomplish their tasks.

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Information architectures and accompanying sitemaps often illustrate page relations with single channels linking them. These architectures are sub-optimal because they do not take advantage of the principle of multiple varied access points to key destinations which can increase the traffic flow to said goals.

Providing multiple and varied pathways to key destinations is a fundamental tenant of both urban planning and building architecture, and thinking of its application in those fields can shed light on this principle’s vast potential in website architecture.

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