Design Strategy

[DigitalBard]

I am about to begin design on a new shopping portal and I have a lot of freedom with it (client is leaving everything up to me).

I am tired of the traditional portals with header, nav on left, content on right, footer type designs.

However, in visiting competitor sites to the client, they all start with this basic design. In fact, most shopping sites that I visit use this basic design as a starter.

Is it ingrained? Am I shooting myself (and the client) if I don't follow it? Obviously, the biggest concern is the customer's ability to navigate the site.

I'm just wondering if changing things up is too radical... Even if the client likes it, will it harm them?

Do you have any favorite shopping related sites that buck the trend?

[Twey]

It depends. That design has evolved for a reason: if you have a lot of information to fit on the page, it's the most efficient and readable way of conveying it. If, however, there's not so much that you need to display, you have more freedom. One of the non-traditional designs that I like best is probably the Cream site.

Of course, if you can think of a way of categorising it efficiently, you can keep it minimalistic.

[djr33]

The reason for this is simple. We read left to right, and that's how webpages work. In fact, you could design a right to left layout (that is nav bar on right), and it would work just fine, but it would be a lot more work to get it to line up properly in every browser as the left-to-right approach is standard.
Web design, and browsers, is also traditionally a vertical setup. That's why a column layout can be at times confusing to make, though not impossible. So a header, with a middle and a footer makes sense.

You're very welcome to do something different, but it will be more difficult to get all browsers to work properly.

Imagine making a round site and the problems you'd have. (It's probably not possible in any real sense.)

Basically the left column and top bar are your two easy options for including stuff on each page, with the content in the portion that remains framed.


On the other side of things, having something familiar is bound to help sales in each of use and familiarity. Just like people have a favorite product for life ("Coke or Pepsi?") people don't tend to like change and stick to what they know. However, if it's great and new enough you can get people that way too.
A little change to not be bland is good. A lot of change just for change will probably be bad. A lot of change in an interesting, innovative way will probably be good, if it catches on.
Shopping sites etc. should be in many ways the easiest to use because that's the sort of site the least technologically inclined will visit. They expect blue links, and you can be sure that if you don't have blue links it really might confuse them for a minute. Of course most can figure more out, but if it's easy, they'll like it and use your site.

But of course the real trick is mixing ease and functionality and aesthetics.

I hope these thoughts help.

But remember, some of the most successful sites do use the basic standard design, so there is certainly no reason it can't work, and in most cases it works well. If you get an exceptional change, then that may work better, but generally the trends work, it seems.

You could make just two rows of the top bar and skip the left column, if you found it more visually appealing, but the other method is used more, I think, because it is more efficient at displaying a lot at once, and it's expandable. If you just have a top bar, it can only be as wide as a page (and pages where you must scroll to the right are really unfriendly), but for a left column, it can expand down many times the height of the screen, and often does.

I suppose the other trend, now, is to have more complex menus. When you hover over them, they open, and you suddenly have more space on your page. Tabs, frames, and other dynamic content also allow a layered space, where one place on the screen can be a lot at once. However, this is not ever totally reliable for all browsers, so a fallback is needed, though the site will look nice for those who can see it, of course assuming it isn't over the top (and we've all seen how annoying that can be).

[DigitalBard]

Thanks.

I'm thinking I'm gonna go with a non-traditional home page with unique visual elements, but stick to traditional for the rest of the site. I want the home page to really "pop out" and grab the viewers attention.

Time to grab my sketch pad and head to the lake for the rest of the afternoon...

[Twey]

Just like people have a favorite product for life ("Coke or Pepsi?")

Not to hijack the topic too much, but I find it an odd coincidence that you should mention this — I always thought that was a geek thing ('Linux or BSD?', 'emacs or vi?') and found it quite amusing that someone should care so much about their carbonated caffeine-hit of choice. Personally I drink either quite happily, on the rare occasions that I decide to drink cola. The coincidence is that I found out about this for the first time only earlier today.

[DigitalBard]

Not to hijack the topic too much, but I find it an odd coincidence that you should mention this — I always thought that was a geek thing ('Linux or BSD?', 'emacs or vi?') and found it quite amusing that someone should care so much about their carbonated caffeine-hit of choice. Personally I drink either quite happily, on the rare occasions that I decide to drink cola. The coincidence is that I found out about this for the first time only earlier today.

It's all about taste... My ex-wife got me switched to diet coke a while back and now I can't drink regular coke (too sweet). I tried diet pepsi and it just tasted "off".

These days my drink of choice is Monster (green) energy drinks.