Design philosophy

When the World Wide Web was originally developed in 1989 its sole purpose was to share information amongst scientist and researchers.

It’s still about information! (AKA content).

However it has evolved. It’s not just about information any more. It’s also about presentation and navigation.

Web sites are comprised of three main elements :

Presentation; AKA Look and feel: The images colors and layout
Navigation; AKA Usability: The ease with which users can find information
Information; AKA Content: The information itself

Here at Clueless Designs, we think we have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t regarding these three Web site elements. There are many designs shops out there who will build whatever you tell them to in order to get a paycheck, even if it isn’t very good! We are not one of them. We will partner with you to make sure your sites presentation, navigation, and information is the best it can be.

Look and feel (Presentation)

Your business or project is distinctive! Don’t you want your Web site to reflect your unique place in the world? Of course you do! Be wary of design shops promising turn around times of 2- or 3 days for $400. This means they’ll spend $75 to download a template, swap out a few pictures, and insert the text you send them. Your “unique” site looks pretty much exactly like the hundreds of others sites that use the same template.

At Clueless Designs, our Service Philosophy dictates that we’ll treat you differently than everyone else, and do our best to custom match the look and feel of your website to your individual style and web development service approach to what you do. We'll:

custom design graphics
find just the right photos
adjust the layout
experiment with different colors
evolve and adapt as you do
create the Presentation that fits you

Our goal is to have visitors to your website know what you’re about within 5 seconds after loading.

The homepage

There are many home pages out there that are so chock-a-block with information it's hard to make sense of it all. Have you ever come across one of those home pages that has a monster scroll bar on the right with blocks of text and links containing almost all the information in the site lined up on one page? Even worse is when there are little to no graphics and it’s nearly impossible to know exactly what the site if about without some digging!

Your site’s homepage has a very specific role. Think of it as a magazine cover. web site vision

Its job is to entice the user to “pick it up” and flip through it.
It should tell the user the general gist of what’s inside in a moment.
It should offer a few juicy tidbits of what's new and different inside.
It should give the user the general layout of where to find the information in all the other pages.

At Clueless Designs we prefer to keep our home pages relatively simple and clutter free. There is a “hot spot” that is just down and in from the upper left corner. This is where users eyes tend to focus first. So this is where we like to put those “juicy tidbits”, and if we've designed the site correctly, they'll find all the other information they need easily!

The layout of the page elements

Imagine going into a Wal-Mart to buy a toothbrush, only to find after wandering all along the front of the store, the pharmacy department is in the back corner! Everyone knows that the pharmacy department is somewhere along the front of the store.

It’s good to be different! It’s not good to be so different that it frustrates your users who have come to expect things to be in a certain place. Unless there is an extremely compelling reason to change it, we prefer to keep our Header navigation buttons somewhere along the top. Secondary links should be obvious on the sides somewhere, and graphics should work with the text, complimenting the ideas close by.

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Usability (Navigation)

Your Web sites usability is an extension of its look and feel. However it runs much deeper, and of the three elements, this one has the most impact on the success of a users visit to your site!

There are many Web sites out there that are not particularly usable.

The information is scattered all over the place
The navigation doesn’t make logical sense
It’s really hard to tell exactly where you’re at

If this were a map for your vacation, you’d throw it away and buy a new one!

Information Structure is different from links.

Information Structure is the actual location of all the site’s individual Web pages in relation to each other. Picture an organizational chart. See example.

HEADERS are the same on every page on the site. (The file folders at the top of Clueless Designs pages.)

SECONDARYS change, depending on which page a user is on. (The links on the left on Clueless Designs pages.)

Any page in the site can link to any other page in the site, regardless of where they lie in the information structure!

Usabilty (Navigation) continued...

At Clueless Designs, our Service Philosophy dictates that in order to customize a site unique to you, we need to find out exactly what it is about you that is unique! In other words we’re going to dig, make you think about what you do and why, until we can create an Information unique web site choices Structure that not only makes logical sense…

but contains no more than 7 headers (1 of which is the home page). Each Header will have no more than 7 secondarys. Each secondary can have additional page under it. (Yup, no more than 7).

Why 7?

It’s been scientifically proven than when people are faced with more than 7 choices they get confused more easily and have a more difficult time making a decision. So let’s make it easier for our users!

Navigation buttons

At Clueless Designs we custom design the Header navigation buttons.

There are many sites that use a navigation bar, sometimes with “drop-down" menus. These bars are very difficult to alter other than the color and size, and our personal experience with drop-downs has been frustrating! The darn thing disappears right when we get to the link we want.

So we custom design graphics to use as navigation buttons, and prefer to add in two other elements (the bread crumb and the insta-link) to help users navigate. The draw back? Our sites do take an extra few seconds to load, but we think it’s worth it.

The Bread-Crumb and the Insta-link

The Bread crumb refers to the "You are here" line of links that tells a user exactly where they are within the Information structure.

The Insta-link is our answer to the site map and “search”. The trouble with site searches is they often don’t take you exactly where you want to go, and frankly can get a bit confusing.

Industry standard says users should be able find any information within 3 clicks…. Insta-link allows just that at any time from any page!

The one additional element that we think is important

It amazes us how often we click a link and the page we are taken to is named something different! Did we actually make it where we intended to go? At Clueless Designs we like to have a big page title right at the top of every page that corresponds almost word for word with any links coming into it…. That way users can know in an instant they’ve arrive at the right place!

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Content (Information)

FACT: Internet users do not read! They scan.

I'm in a a hurry. I want to find the information I'm looking for quickly without having to do much reading. If I'm really interested, I’ll dig deeper, but please don’t make me read big blocks of text just to find the information I need!

At Clueless Designs we use lots of different headlines to break information into chunks. We use bold print in virtually every paragraph. We use lists to "bulletpoint" the key ideas.

So the user can scan quickly and know what’s going on within that page….
Within that paragraph….
In a glance.

However, don’t think this means we skimp on content!

Quite the opposite.

We feel your website should give a user all the information they need to make an informed decision without the necessity to call and ask questions.

check out custom web sites We prefer to give people the answers right up front! So we have plenty of links to help people jump from topic to topic and find the information they are looking for.

Many design shops will make you turn in all the content and won't help write it. Not us! Here’s the cool thing we like to do….

We actually enjoy writing the content for your site.

If you don’t have the time or the skill to write engaging content, we’ll do all the work for you!

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Why choose
Clueless Designs
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Design philosophy
Service philosophy