Designers...

MGDesigns

As a designer what is more important in regards to your site?

01. Frontend Design
02. Clean coding
03. Browser compatible
04. Navigation
05. Interactivity
06. Usability
07. User feedback
09. Returning visitors
10. Domain value
These are in no particular order lol

Feel free to put them in an order of your choosing or come up with completely different answers. I just found it extremely interesting earlier when a friend and I were chatting about it :alien:

tshugo

MGDesigns wrote:

01. Frontend Design
04. Navigation
06. Usability
09. Returning visitors

I would say that these are most important to me

mav

Front End Design
Navigation/Usability

Those affect my designing the most, seeing as they have the most to do with the actual graphical design imo.

JaredRitchey

Can I add a comment on one thing I find to be 80% of a web sites success? In our business we say "Appearance is golden but CONTENT is king" naturally this has been revised in post SEO days to read "Appearance is golden but UNIQUE CONTENT is king"

You never get a second chance to make a first impression and while design in my opinion is paramount at setting the tone, interaction and perceived value of the site, content will keep em there.

~ Jared

MGDesigns

Thanks for your input Jared

Unfortunately the majority of surfers very rarely read content

Nuvo

If a site is hard to use, users won't want to use it.
If a site isn't be best looking, people might use it, but might be put off.
If a site has no content of interest, it's not interesting.

Basically, it's important to me to make sure that the stuff I do is well coded, viewable in browsers and easy to access.
If a site is only designed to work correctly in one browser, users from the other browser will find it ugly or unusable, meaning they won't continue using it and all your hard content creation was a waste of time.
This is a bigger problem on community sites as users who can't access things can't create content and thus, you have a nasty looking site with virtually zero content and no users.

Interactivity is good as it allows the user to feel more envolved, but peppering a site with AJAX and such will cause issues at some point (I can't stand to use Krugle because it uses AJAX, not because there's anything wrong with it's searching abiities).
Interactivity has to be done right to come off well, and making everything update without refreshing isn't the right way to do it.
Sure, it's fine to AJAXify something like a previewer so that you don't need to refresh or use an iframe (I do it in my app), but doing it with the whole system sucks and will have you writing a billion different back buttons that you shouldn't need.

I'd like to think that if I've built a good site and put effort into making it popular, that people will come back without me needing to add extra garbage to draw them in, and if I act on user feedback, they will be happy and use the site again.

MGDesigns

Nuvo do you have any tips on how to make site design browser compatible?

Nuvo

W3C compliant = Should work in Gecko, Opera and KHTML browsers (basically, everything that isn't Explorer).
Hacks = Works in Explorer.

There's a few hacks which can be used to make Internet Explorer show sites correctly on Alistapart if I remember rightly.

Mystii

01. Frontend Design
02. Clean coding
03. Browser compatible
04. Navigation
05. Interactivity
06. Usability
07. User feedback
09. Returning visitors
10. Domain value


Hmmm...

Usability is probably first for me. I think I need to think about the rest.

CannonBallGuy

I'm not saying this is the key to a successful site, in fact, this is probably the total opposite.
This is my personal ordering and I've had no sites be even half-successful.

Clean coding
Usability
Navigation
Interactivity
Browser compatible
Frontend Design

I like to use pure css type designs, example. I like to keep my code VERY clean, minimalist(ic), even.

ryan

Domains and graphics and website content is the most important