Connecting the dots, and joining to threads together from disparate parts of the web recently encountered: Trevor Goss’ post ‘Do it Like Facebook‘ of Nov 13, ‘09 and Lukas Mathis’ post ‘Consistency‘ from June 28, ‘08, I thought I would write a quick blog post on the topic of Web Standards and highlighting the need follow convention, as boring as it sounds.

Consistency and standards are at the heart of my recent post Are You Asking the Right Questions? in which I ventured to suggest that any designer, developer and business owner needs to put their real clients, web site visitors, at the heart of their every choice and decision to make their lives as quick, simple, and as easy as possible.

Unless you have a very compelling product or offering, a confused customer is one that you will lose very quickly, and will be reflected in bounce rate and low conversion rate metrics data.  In Trevor Goss’ argument you need to follow the BIG BOYS because people have come to know, trust, and understand them and their site layouts, and because you can bet your bottom dollar that they have spent many hours discussing, designing, building, testing, and then improving every last element on their sites.

The current position of those sites, irrespective of how you rate them is the accumulation thousands and thousands of hours of construction, testing and subsequent polish.  They will have tied A/B split testing, analysed heat maps, mouse tracking, eye ball tracking, put designs in front of users and focus groups and acted on their responses, and it doesn’t matter how big or small your site is you should be doing the same.

Understood it might be overkill to go the whole hog with all of those types of tests, but many are simple to implement and even FREE, providing invaluable feedback from a transparent layer. At the least a quick straw poll of your TARGET AUDIENCE would be a MUST.  You can see how the kiddies at Last.fm went about their testing process armed with laptop, free wi-fi and coffee at an informal location in Central London in this blog post Guerilla User Testing in Central London by Matt Brown.

It still amazes me how features, designs, layouts, and new, surreal and completely untested navigation styles will be rolled out on big campaign web sites completely untried with the expectation that users will GET IMMEDIATELY the concept and that the things will be a complete success. Which brings us nicely onto the Lukas Mathis blog post about consistency in application design.

Web sites don’t need to be all the same ol’ plain vanilla flavour but they do need to be consistent in their layout, in the same way that desktop applications need to be consistent in their core features and functionality.  You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you do a web site, and users reward you for not doing so by being obedient to your cause.  There are many well known books, for example Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, that guide you through the basics of web standards, and plenty of column and blog inches have been spent discussing the finer points of design elements such as pager link designs, analyzing those on facebook, flickr, and other major sites.  These are all worth checking out before and during the design process.

Optimisation, and therein consistency and standards, really does need to be at the heart of everything you do and this includes the design and layout of your site and the elements within it.  Nothing you do when building a site is new, millions of web sites have gone before you and every last details tried, tested and optimised, so remember that and get out there and research to be sure you are getting the most out of whatever you roll out to the world wide web.