Image courtesy of Smashing Magazine
The youth will always love technology, why? Because technology is a youth dominated market in the sense that experience does not give you any extra advantage. Wisdom and experience do not trump knowledge and creativity, and that is why some of the biggest names in the business from Facebook and Google in USA to Seven Seas in Kenya were all started by people under the age of 30. Today I’m here to address you, the budding innovator, who wants to launch a website for your company but has no experience in basic web design. Here are some things you must consider
1.) Efficiency defeats beauty
Everybody wants a beautiful website, and by beautiful I mean just that, with the coolest graphics at the top and an image fading into another which fades into another ad infinitum, then a large background image here, several gifs there and a few pictures of events that you attended the previous day. The list is long and the first thing I’ll say is, the more the trickery the more the cost to you of designing the website and it doesn’t answer the question is the site functional? People might admire the beauty of Bing’s daily wallpapers but they still go to Google for their search queries for this reason.
2.) The more the Accessories the longer it loads
When planning for a website all these accessories I’ve mentioned above require bandwidth and that’s what determines how fast a site loads and the cost of hosting it. This is why there are very few websites that open with a theme song; it is not the lack of creativity of royalties for a soundtrack but the time it will take to load it. Sure you can have a Rasta man dancing virtual girl style in the front ground shouting “Bring it back Selekta ! Again! Again! Again !” followed by a soundtrack but I have to remind you that this site will not only be seeing with the latest tablet connected via fibre but will also be seen by those on old computers using out-dated browsers via a modem connection where the user is literally counting the Mbs as they go.
Your visitors shouldn’t see this page for too long.
To use an example of this Kenya web hosting company’s website, you can see the product and the graphics are of high standard and it can load on any format not because it can’t be done better but because we must remember that not everyone in the region is connected via high speed cables.