Having gone over the fundamentals of how to maintain your directory via editorial standards, and maintenance, its perhaps time we looked at the importance design plays in a directory. I’m going to discuss whether it plays an important part with both the search engines and visitors alike. The expert directory owner will probably already know most of this so the blog is aimed more at the newcomer. If anyone out there is willing to share and has something to add then that would be great as no doubt I’ve probably missed out some.

Before we carry on I’d like to list what I think are a few basic essentials that a good website should take into account when designing no particular order I’ve made some bullet points of what I think makes for a well designed directory.

• Fast Loading
• Static
• Fluid
• Easy to Navigate
• Valid w3c
• Valid CSS
• Good SEO

Rather than me ‘re-invent the wheel’ as someone put it on one of the forums, I won’t go into too much depth, instead preferring to skim over each point using external references with my own ideas, which should result in us achieving the best possible, and more importantly ‘effective design’ for both search engine and visitor.

Choosing SEO as the first area of discussion a good design should incorporate all of the above points, if you want to maximise the efficiency of it. By taking into account the key points above you’ll see the results in no time at all.

Fast loading is one of the obvious, I remember my early days of helping out on layouts of the various directories I worked on, and at one time I recall the benchmark for a visitor to wait for a page to load was about 8 seconds maximum before they got fed up and quickly left. With the introduction of faster internet access that’s not so much an issue, although a graphically intense design can challenge even the fastest internet connection as I found out today with a newly released directory I won’t name.

Its not news that a slow loading webpage can lose you up to half of your visitors, especially of they aren’t lucky to have a fast internet connection and make the mistake of using Firefox to browse, as that can be much slower than its competitors. Besides, why would a directory want to be graphically intense? Isn’t the idea of a directory to provide a simple, clean and easy to navigate structure of categories and links? Is there really any need to have fancy designs like some have these days?

I like some of the fancier designs personally, I’m always glad to see something that’s pleasing to the eye, but its far more important to me that that regardless of the design, image wise, it must contain the essentials mentioned above. To test a graphically rich directory I chose one of the most popular, or certainly one of the better know ones that most of you will already, secondly, it has a design that on the face of it you’d think would take an age to load but it doesn’t. (Well not in my browser anyway). But without giving away the directory url, (the purpose isn’t to criticise) look at the analysis of it!

According the the statistics (below) it can take up to 40 seconds to load! That’s slow in anyone’s books, although I’m fairly confident that 14.4 connection is now about as obsolete as it can get.

Ignoring the slower connection there are still an awful lot of internet users out there that still have cable with a rough speed of 512Kps, to perhaps 1Mbp. You can test what speed you have by using this free tool here, its about one of the most accurate that I found while testing.

When you’ve established the speed of your internet connection you can have some fun checking out how fast or slow loading your own site is, here. Have some fun with it, not only will it give you an estimate of how fast your site loads, it will also give you advice on where you may be going wrong and how to rectify this. Remember, the idea is to beat the 8 second rule. I’m pretty sure that most of you will, but just in case, it certainly won’t hurt you to put your directory to through these tests.

So assuming you’ve now got your directory running under the acceptable level lets go to the aesthetics of it. Do you need to have a bunch of pretty looking graphics in it? After all, its links your showing isn’t it, nothing more? I tend to disagree, and even though our own directory has as minimal graphics as we could manage, I still tend to think that a good design goes a long way to attracting attention, and that can’t be bad. I always analogise design and appeal by using the example of the Plumbers van, both are white, but one has been washed, and has clean legible writing on it describing exactly what it does. The other is also white, but it hasn’t been washed, and the writing in it is poorly thought out and doesn’t make for easy reading. Which plumber would you be more likely to choose?

I know I’d probably go for the shiny white one, even if it was that little bit expensive. It simply ‘appears’ to be reputable and in my eyes first impressions often count. It’s no different from directories, or any other website for that matter. It’s very often the case of first impressions. I’m not sure everyone will agree with me on that, I’m only speaking as I find.

Next comes the Static Page as opposed to a dynamic page, I’m not going to re-invent the wheel here, instead I’m going to refer you to a great article on the merit of static pages and their benefits here. For those who don’t want to follow the link, the author of the blog Tony Byrne, focusses on the following key benefits.

• Static pages are easier to index.
• Static pages show a better face to external search engines.
• Meaningful file names improve usability.
• No need to worry about database uptime.
• Static pages are actually quite mobile.

I don’t need to expand on anything he’s said, and the bullet points above sum it up pretty nicely.

Next we move to fluid design. Put simply this in our context means whether your Web page will “stretch” or ‘reduce’ as the width of a browser window changes. Or does it stay fixed? Its always a far better choice to go with a fluid design if possible as this caters for the majority rather than the minority. You can use http://www.deeplinker.net/ as an example of what’s fluid. Open your browser full then reduce the size, you’ll see the design ‘move’ with the screen. Of course you can only go so far without it running over but that’s down to the limitations of the graphics we’re using in this example. A fixed design would be a webpage that doesn’t ‘move’ with the size of the browser, the downpoint to this is that you can get a lot of empty space depending on the browser and resolution used. A great reference point for fluid designs is here.

I came to the conclusion though that it would probably be a ‘mix and match’ or ‘hybrid’ of design that would be the best all round, but again its down to personal choice. It’s important to note that neither design style will affect the search engines from indexing it, design issues here are merely aesthetic, and take into account the end user more than anything.

Easy to navigate. This is my favourite part, simply becuase I grew up with a bunch of psychologist and psychiatrists who taught me how people read, and how to maximize that. People invariably read from top, left to right, down to the bottom. You’ll get your ’skimmers’, who’ll try and look at as much of the page as they can in the hope of finding what they want but by and large the rule of left to right is how we do it. (You can call it Zig-zagging if you like) because that’s the shape you form when reading. Take a sit back for a second and think about ‘how your reading‘ this page for instance, your not starting from the bottom up are you? Are you! So because of this natural phenomenon a good design will capitalize on this by putting what they want to be seen in a uniformed manner. In directories the main one you’d think of is the alphabetical status of the category structure.

To show you a bad design, (and this is in no way a criticism of the directory) is The Orange Pages, take a look at the way they’ve done their structure, instead of following the rule of left to right, top to bottom, even as simple a thing as that can throw you. If your like me, when you looked at ‘Arts’. didn’t you expect to find a category beginning with the letter ‘B’ or even ‘C’ by the right of it, not the ‘H’ thats’ there? For some reason this whole page now throws you out of synch. It’s nowhere near as easy to navigate as say Cantufind.com is. Yet the difference is subtle. It follows the rules, left to right. Try it out on your family or friends, see if they can spot the difference.

This left to right of design is a key method you can use to market your site, I’ll talk about that in another blog, otherwise we’d go on and on.

I’ll finish on the ‘Codes of good design’ now. The W3C and CSS, while you can’t see these in the actual front of the design, they are effectively the engine of design. Good application of both these standards is vital to a web sites success. Its still open for debate as to whether a design rendered as Valid HTML, or Valid CSS, I certainly think it does make a difference but proving it is another thing. Fortunately for me someone did do a test to try and establish this. And not wanting to re-invent the wheel, I’ll link you to the page, you’ll find it fascinating reading, I know I did.

It basically tells you what I thought, that Google at least do seem to prefer valid CSS and HTML as laid down by the W3C consortium. Granted that this test is in its infancy the results a pretty interesting don’t you think? So, what conclusion have we come to on how to create a good design for a directory. Pretty simple really, make sure you try and include each of the bullet points at the beginning of this blog and you won’t go far wrong.