Best Practices For Magazine Website Design
Saturday, April 17th, 2010| Sometimes it’s hard to march to a different beat. Especially when the beat is an oldie but goodie. This seems particularly true for publishers trying to transition from print to web. Too many magazines have yet to build an online presence and most of the ones that have are ignoring many, if not all of today’s best practices in web design.
Here are a couple of the most commonly broken rules. Flash Flash intros, flash content – anything but flash banner advertisements are major no nos for digital magazines. He is how I explain it to my clients. Think of a web site as a book with many pages. Search engines scan those pages looking for content that their match their users requests. In essence, every page is an opportunity to attract new users to your site. Now think of flash as a movie. Flash is in a format that is not scanned or read by search engines. Yes, a search engine understands there is a flash object, can read the name on the flash object, and can present it for viewing but, the content it contains is embedded and not search-able by search engines. If your objective as an online publication is to publish content on the web, you are basically burying your content and killing your search engine rankings by choosing to design your site in flash.
Color Print magazines tend to style their web sites like their magazines. That’s fine if you’re Real Simple but not a good idea for most. When designing for online content that is meant to be read, a white background is the way to go. That doesn’t mean abandon your branding. Keep your font systems, logo and general feel of your print magazine. Just put it on a light or white canvas. Structure Online magazines seem to be plagued with poor navigation systems. A magazine structure is pretty basic. Left to right. A website is a bit different. Multiple menus with consistent placement work best. Magazines have lots of content so, structuring is crucial. Great structuring will ensure that end users find the information they are looking for and entice passive users to click around and read more. Common mistakes are long menu systems, inconsistent placement, hidden menus, flash menus and photo menus. Interactive You don’t have to do too much research to find out that social networks are a big thing. There is certainly no shortage of information on the role that user submitted content has had on online publications. Yet, surprisingly, many magazine websites fail to integrate even the most basic of interactive media. Blogs, micro blogs, commenting systems, photo sharing, content sharing, social bookmarking , new media platforms are developing daily. It’s time for online publications to get their heads out of print and embrace social media if they are to have a go at a prosperous web presence. Social media is hear to stay. Deciding to include social media as part of your publication means building the right foundation for your site from the beginning. Foundation Think of your website as a house on a nice piece of property. There is a lot of potential there but only if the original structure is sound and accepting of expansion. May of the magazine websites I see on the web have lousy foundations. A digital magazine, a flip book, where can you build from here? How are you reaching out to you reader? With a flash site too, you’re limited. Don’t design you site for today. Design it today with tomorrow in mind and you’ll have a far better product to work with. Fran Jacoberger is a NY web design & marketing agency. To learn more visit franjacoberger.com |
