Comprehensive Examination - Essay Example

Discuss key factors important in the design of an internet website, including visual design navigation design, functionality, and user friendliness.A website is like an identity for a company on the internet. Thus it is essential that a website is well designed not only for look and feel, but also for user friendliness. The website has to be easy to navigate, excellent content which has all relevant information, good functionalities, easy usability and most essentially capable of retaining visitors and making them revisit as well (Barnes, 2008).

The visual design of the website is a very important factor and it influences the user’s first impression, his experience and his trust on the website. Hence it is essential to make the website appealing to the end user and at the same time, it has to be professional.The navigation design or the site hierarchy has to be carefully planned with the objectives in mind. Normally three-tier architecture is used in setting up the site hierarchy. The first tier is the landing page of the user; the second tier represents the next level where the website wants the users to reach.

The third tier is the page where the objectives of the company, such as sales, gathering customer details, etc.., are present (Thompson, 2006). In this web 2.0 age, it is essential to ensure that the functionality is perfect across all the pages in a website. This functionality also requires careful consideration and the flow of information and the ease of use within the website, all depend on the functionality design. The final and most important aspect of websites is the user friendliness. The site should be simple and it should clearly display the intended content and links to the user.

Complex websites often result in lack of user friendliness and hence result in lesser repeat users. Hence user friendliness has to be present and users from all demographics should be able to access the information with ease.State your opinion about where you believe the technical coding of websites is today relative to the past and the future. Give evidence to support your opinion.Initially, Internet was used to display information. In the recent years, Interactive services and Ecommerce have become very common and this has led to advanced coding which involves a lot of server side coding as opposed to the client side scripts used in the past.

The platforms and frameworks for technical coding have developed and many new advanced platforms such as ASP.NET 3.5 and PHP are becoming very common. Many standards have become inevitable for website coding. When compared to the past, nowadays, websites are all validated to follow these standards for many reasons, one of the main being search engine optimization. In the past, interactive features were considered as additional, whereas interactive web 2.0 services have become expected features by the customers.

The introduction of Ecommerce and the frequent transfer of sensitive data across the website have resulted in the quantum leap of security and encryption algorithms employed by the programmers (Martins and Baros, 2008).As the internet age is becoming more and more advanced, in the future, more advanced coding will come into effect, in order to increase the real time data processing capabilities (Thorisson and Stein, 2003). To improve customer experience, activity tracking and real time response systems will become mandatory for all websites which will take the technical coding to completely another level.

ReferencesBarnes, V., 2008, ‘The importance of Design’, Accessed on 3 November 2008, Retrieved from http://www.htmlgoodies.com/introduction/intro/article.php/3473591Martins, N. and Baros, A.D., 2008, ‘Web Special: Past, Present and Future’, Accessed on November 4 2008, Retrieved from http://www.scene360.com/ARTdirect_webdesign_function_part01.phpThompson, P., 2006, ‘Website Essentials: A guide to planning, designing and Managing your Website’, 12 May 2006, Frogeye Publications, United StatesThorisson, G.A. and Stein, L.D., 2003, ‘Website: Past, Present and Future’, Accessed on 4 November 2008, Retrieved fromhttp://www.

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