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Business Website Design: Some Emerging Standards for Developers
Abstract
There can be little doubt that an increasing amount of business is being done on the internet. The websites that are at the center of this new way of thinking and working are a constantly growing and evolving entity. It is also clear that a website must evolve with time to reflect the changing needs of the organisation it represents and the organisation’s user community. Websites that have been designed appropriately will have a definitive edge in attracting users in the emergent trend of electronic commerce (Fisher, 1999). Forresters Research has found that simplicity in website design is of paramount importance in that it contributes to successful website use (Cavanagh, 1999) and simple web design has been advocated as the differentiator between a successful and unsuccessful website (internet.au, 2002; Nielsen, 2000). Website design is also an evolving practice (Sellitto & Wenn, 2000). Whilst Brody (1996) suggests that good design should aim at making information visible and manageable – good design needs constant redesign. Appropriate web design should utilise information as its currency with interface design being a vehicle for conveying that information. In an earlier paper, we proposed some standards that encompassed issues associated with accessibility, proper encoding and metadata inclusion (Wenn & Sellitto, 2001). This paper examines some of the less technical features of website development focusing on issues associated with the visual and information design aspects of websites. These issues generally have a higher degree of subjectivity – they include the areas of information quality, effective information visualisation and presentation design.
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