A little vox-pop exercise:

How many websites have you visited? How many can you remember and visualise right now?

Do you get onto a website, get what you want from it and then get out? Or do you hang around a while and explore it’s content?

Do you like useful websites or nice websites (or perhaps something of both)? Is what you think as nice, also what everyone else thinks as nice?

Do you return to websites? If so is it to get more of the same information or more of the same user experience?

Your answers will probably suggest that you visit a quite a few websites over the course of a week or month, but you do not revisit many websites and you cannot really remember what too many of them were like within about ten minutes. You generally are looking for information or to help you form an opinion about a thing or about an organisation. If you do return to a website, it is because you need to regularly top up on the latest information. You think a website is a reflection of the company behind it. You tend to hate too many whistles and bells getting in the way of finding what you are looking for. Most of your friends and colleagues would agree with you about this.

All this is the essence of interface design. It is not creative in the sense that the above graphic is an abstract piece of art chosen to accompany this entry. It is creative in the sense that a number of disparate factors need to be knitted into an engaging, interesting and useful interface design.

The research also tells us that most people visit three types of websites regularly (not including search engines). They will visit a news site, a special interest site and some people will also check in with a favourite forum. All of these sites offer the user regularly updated information. The most popular become favourites because they are an easy fit. They offer intuitive interface, focused content, not too much content on any one page and not too greater journey to get to where you need to get to. These criteria are also (some of) those used by search engines to base ranking upon.

What this means is that the look of a website is a branding issue, and the design is a navigation issue, the freshness of the content will keep people coming back and the proposition will persuade people to take the first steps to starting a bsuienss relationship with you.

On a separate strand, since people are not revisiting regularly, it means that your website needs to do two other things. It needs to fit in with your other marketing efforts, – i.e. it should underpin your face-to-face work, telephone work, advertising or brochure work. It is the place you can send people after they have made first contact. If so, your site needs to do more than just house information, it needs to make a proposition to your users – and one that they feel compelled to take you up on now rather than thinking about for a while.

But the horizon is fluid. Just when you think you have the perfect solution, new innovations and trends such as the use of video in sites like FaceBook or YouTube start to impact on the rest of the web and you need to consider how to manage that.

About six months ago, all this bothered us. We felt that most companies needed to have control of their own websites through content management systems (CMS) in order to fulfil these basic criteria and respond to changes. But CMS sites are very expensive and out of reach for most SMEs. However, at the same time, the Blogging pastime took on a life of its own. It occurred to us that the same technology used in blogs would also provide SMEs with websites, plus CMS and more.

We experimented, in-fact our site is a blog which we have rebuilt to act as a website. With little fuss we have been able to add a shop to it, a portfolio, add new pages and sections, upload images and all of this could be done by our customers, with a minimum of help. It took us about two days to put together and if we wanted to, we could change the entire look and feel of it at the click of a link.