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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Darlington, Western Australia
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    239

    Default Re: Australian Olive Oil Company

    Quote Originally Posted by Big Frank View Post
    I'm using a screen resolution of 1600 x 900 on my laptop and the content of the website is all below the fold. I think that's too much, having to scroll down to see even a single line of text.
    Yesterday I attended a lecture given by a well known web designer. His lecture was mainly about designing for future technology. He said the whole concept of designing above the fold is null and void and that designers should be designing with pictures and not with text. He stated that the modern user is browsing with newer technology and is speed browsing, garnering information from a site in seconds rather than in minutes. In 2009 the average time a visitor spent browsing a website was 3 minutes and 42 seconds. It is now half that. Apparently visitors want to get an overall picture of what you do, how they can obtain what you do, and how they can contact you. They are not interested in spending time reading stuff on your site. The lecturer said that we should continue to use text for SEO purposes, but be aware that text used is not necessarily information the site visitor wants. He said the speed browser will whisk over the site garnering the information they feel they need, so it is important to design for this new breed of browsers. As many visitors will access your site on the run (in the car, on the bus, in their lunch break, at an appointment etc) you need to design with big pictures, and each picture should have a linking function, even if it is just to take the browser to the contact or about us page. He mentioned that speed browsers like to touch everything and see that thing expand or link to somewhere else.

    One thing he said that I felt was quite interesting was that he said too many sites are way to big. He gave the example of website designers. He mentioned that WS designers have a tendency to "lecture" to people on their websites and that they stuff their sites full of 'articles' and informative resources in the belief that this is appropriate and effective SEO for google, and that visitors will consider this wonderful information to be so valuable that they will be grateful to the designer and decide to get him to make their website. He said e-commerce sites are possibly twice as large as they need to be, and that it is ludicrous to think that visitors to the site will actually read more than 2 pages. He said he personally gets frustrated by all the small print navigation bars that not only run along the top of the site, but also down the side, and he expressed that navigation bars are difficult to navigate on iphones and that we should abandon the navigation bar.

    He summarised by saying design sites so that they are picture rich, not text rich, use big pictures, make sure every picture can be touched and linked to somewhere else that has significance to the visitor, the fold is null and void, and throw away the navigation bar as it no longer has a place in new technology.

    I actually like nav bars, and I personally spend about 5 minutes on each site I visit, but speaking with my sons and their friends last night about the lecture, they agreed with the web designer. They are avid iphone users and access websites mainly from their phones. They said they only spend enough time on a site to get an overall picture of what is going on, they get the contact info, and that's all. They said they will stay on a site if the site looks appealing, but most importantly they will stay on the site if they can move around it easily, for example by touching pictures or large text panels to navigate on the site. They said they leave a site if they need to expand a nav bar to be able to read it, and they felt nav bars and subsequent menus are too fiddly to mess around with on their phones. They said they prefer text to be in point form, and they want the text to get straight to the crux of what the site is about. They agreed with the lecturer that big pictures that tell the story immediately entice them to stay on a site. Interestingly, they said they found sites designed for mobile phones to be a bit boring. They preferred sites designed for PCs that do not have nav bars, but also designed with touch-users in mind. They are not interested in slideshows or moving text or anything too fancy on a site. My sons and their friends are in their twenties and early thirties, and this is the demographic that the designer said we should be aiming to please as they are the biggest consumers on the planet and are probably our clients.

    I would be interested to hear from others on this subject, and Frances if you think this should be moved elsewhere please feel free to pop it wherever you feel is more appropriate.
    Live your life in such a way that when your feet hit the floor in the morning, Satan shudders and says, 'Oh s$%#t....she's awake!'

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
    Location
    Sunshine Coast BC, Canada. In a beautiful part of BC's temperate rainforest
    Posts
    9,864

    Default Re: Australian Olive Oil Company

    I have copied this from a thread in the Xara Web Gallery.
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
    My current Xara software: Designer Pro 365 12.6

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  3. #3
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Location
    England
    Posts
    2,044

    Default Re: Australian Olive Oil Company

    Hmm I'm not sure I would agree with him/her. That's like saying all books should have lots of pictures and few words. Whilst that would be fine for children's books it would not work for all. I imagine the reduction of average time on site has a lot to do with how much rubbish there is out there and people are adapting their ways to quickly sort the wheat from the chaff.

    To continue the book analogy, what do you do when you are browsing for a book in a library ? You look at the cover, title, back, read the preface, table of contents, flick through and get a feel for the pitch and style. At all points you are assessing the book and working out if it is worth your time and effort. If it, at any time, fails this test you put the book back on the shelf. With a site you have just seconds to convince the visitor that it is worth progressing to the next step and as long as you keep delivering the goods at each stage then the depth and complexity is immaterial. They will only leave once they have found what they want or you run out of content. Define your target and build your site/page just for them.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jan 2010
    Location
    Bradford, England
    Posts
    1,827

    Default Re: Australian Olive Oil Company

    I'm partly in agreement with the lecturer as I recently created a website with a photo driven navigation bar ( http://www.theheadmasterbradford.com/) and this is very quick and easy to use on a phone, but I also have a smaller navigation bar as well. I believe that above the fold is very important, the home page should have information on what you do and a call to action, and cater to people with a 5 second attention span. Also remember that the landing page from google is not always the home page. If someone lands on a secondary page they must still be a call to action somewhere above the fold.

    And no to contradict myself. How many people have iphones and ipads compared to people who have laptops and desktops? I think we are getting ahead of ourselves, there are designers who are designing sites more for portable devices than personal computers because they want to be seen to be designing for future technology, according to my google analytics for my site less than 6% of visitors are from phones and ipads. We need to stop buying into the hype.
    Flawless Form. Faultless Function. Crafted by Cloud

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  5. #5
    Join Date
    Apr 2010
    Location
    Kildare, Ireland
    Posts
    906

    Default Re: Australian Olive Oil Company

    I actually read this post on my phone sitting in the living room. I find in the last year or so I'm using mobile technology more and more for web browsing, even at home. It's so convenient and comfortable to just pull out my android phone or tablet, much more so than even using my laptop or netbook. It's great for general browsing, reading forums etc. but if I want to participate/interact more with a website I still prefer to use my laptop with real keyboard and mouse. So all my forum posting, online ordering etc. is done mostly on laptop at home. This is just my experience though, and a new age of internet users might be just as happy to do all of this on a mobile device like there phone, and maybe I will too some day soon. I think it makes sense to bear this in mind when designing a website these days.

    I just had a quick look over a few of my site stats and mobile usage varies between 3% to 13% from site to site. I think this will increase quite a bit more as smart phones and tablets become more common. Right now there's a ton of people around the world using older phones with crappy browsers, when that old tech phases out and people move to newer phones with better browsers the numbers will go up.

    According to statcounter mobile internet usage is doubling year on year...
    http://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobi...g-year-on-year
    XT-CMS - a self-hosted CMS for Xara Designers - Xara + CMS Demo with blog & ecommerce shopping cart system.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Location
    England
    Posts
    2,044

    Default Re: Australian Olive Oil Company

    Just checked my stats. Tablets and phones around 6.78% with IPad accounting for 3.22% of that.

    I'm not worried yet but eventually I can see myself building three versions of style sheet. One each for lap/desktops tablets and phones.

    Doing this in Xara wont be easy

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Aug 2000
    Location
    Placitas, New Mexico, USA
    Posts
    41,476

    Default Re: Australian Olive Oil Company

    Abi

    One thing I have learned over the years is everyone has an opinion and most people are partially right.

    Too many websites are crammed with way too much stuff. Too much blather.

    But I do not think you can be so general. Some sites require more explanation than others. Some lend themselves to pictures and others lend themselves more to words. Though visual aids are never a bad thing. If they are appropriate. And if they help to communicate your point.

    A website for a lawyer or an accountancy site that is all photos would not provide much information. How do you do a case history in pictures? Charts or graphs or happy smiling people. But you still need good, clear and well crafted copy to fill in the blanks.

    I believe you have to ask yourself as a designer, what is the product or service I am designing this site for? What will visitors be looking for when she or he visits the site. And how can I in the most direct manner possible, make it easy for him or her to find the content he or she is looking for, and how can I let these visitors contact the site owner.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Location
    Central North Carolina
    Posts
    844

    Default Re: Australian Olive Oil Company

    Interesting -

    But is not the reason for so much text (content) on sites these days the direct result of Googles change to their search engine which relies so much on that content? For some period of time now, content has been the main ladder to the top of Googles heap. - jb
    - jb

    "A little knowledge is a wonderful thing - sometimes."
    www.brownpotters.com

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Dec 2000
    Location
    Hautes Pyrénées, France
    Posts
    5,083

    Default Re: Australian Olive Oil Company

    Quote Originally Posted by Abikadabra View Post
    He summarised by saying design sites so that they are picture rich, not text rich, use big pictures, make sure every picture can be touched and linked to somewhere else that has significance to the visitor, the fold is null and void, and throw away the navigation bar as it no longer has a place in new technology.
    perfect example of a web designer lecturing to people with arrogant subjectivity
    If someone tried to make me dig my own grave I would say No.
    They're going to kill me anyway and I'd love to die the way I lived:
    Avoiding Manual Labour.

 

 

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