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User experience (or UX) is an important factor in the design of a website - we've all encountered websites that make us want to give up before we're found what we're looking for. This applies even when you're not trying to sell a product. When we design your site, we take care of a lot of these considerations for you, but sometimes it's something worth discussing before the project begins.

For example, does your site have a lot of subpages? Dropdown menus with more than 15 items begin to become tedious for users - especially those on mobile devices. Instead, we might put them in a side-bar once the user has clicked on the page. If possible, you should also avoid a 2nd level of dropdown menu, as user often find these troublesome. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, though - very large dropdown menus with categories such as on http://www.foodnetwork.com/ score quite well in usability tests. This sort of menu could be useful in a school that has both a secondary and sixth-form section, for example.

Another key consideration in usability is speed. How quickly the page loads, and how much time the user feels is getting wasted contributes significantly to their satisfaction or frustration with your website. Many of the sites we build include a slideshow on the home page - they're great for adding colour and interest. We also give you the ability to add or remove new slides whenever you like. Images make up a large proportion of a page's load time, though, so be careful not to add so many images that your user is forced to site and wait for the page to load. Whilst an extra 30 seconds or so may not sound like much, delays like these will encourage users to leave your site sooner.

This is even more important for visitors on mobile devices using 3g networks - for this reason, we usually remove the slider as part of our responsive process for small-screen users. Whilst it may seem like your site is not as impressive without it, users will value a quick, clean, usable site over one that looks amazing but clunks along at a snail's pace.

If you find yourself with lots of sub-pages and areas to your site, it's always a good idea to have a site map linked somewhere unobstrusively in the menu at the bottom of your home page. A site map is essentially a long indented list of all pages on your website. When a user is having trouble finding a particular page, the sitemap is a handy reference on all but the largest of sites. Not only that, search engines 'crawl' through your site map to make sure they've visited every public page on your site.

If you want to go that little bit further in helping your users find what they're looking for, we also regularly include a search bar which reads through all the content you've added to the site. This is always a good idea, as it helps a user with a specific aim in mind (for instance, 'Uniform Policy') get straight to what they need. This also means that it's often a better idea to put information into a page rather than attaching it as a .pdf or Word document, because these can't be searched, and users would often rather not have to download a document to get the information they need - and mobile users may be unable to open the documents anyway.

So these are the main areas of usability over which you'll have an influence, but our designers will take care of a lot of other little details for you. The end result is a website that not only looks great, but does what it was made to do well - present your school  pofessionally, and communicate with prospective parents, students, and staff effectively.