Making websites work.

Have you ever wondered ...

Who designs the websites you visit every day--sites like Yahoo!, Google, Hotmail or ICAF.org? Who came up with the ideas that make these sites fun to visit and useful to you, your friends and your family? Well, you might be surprised to learn that these sites are actually the work of not just a single artist, but hundreds of people working together to create pages and pages of content, tools and applications that make the sites worth visiting.

Though the best web pages often look pretty simple, making a good website is actually quite hard; but that's not because you have to know a lot about technology to make them. The programming languages and graphic tools people use to create websites, like HTML, Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop, are actually pretty easy to learn. What makes Web sites hard to make is that you have to know a lot about people!

Sometimes making works of art is just about having fun, or about expressing yourself. Many people make personal Web pages for that very reason. But most of the bigger websites are created in order to help other people do stuff, like write e-mails to their friends, read articles about different subjects, find answers to their questions, buy gifts for people or have fun playing games.

So when people set out to design these sites, they have to think hard about what the people who visit their website are going to do, and try to make it as easy as possible for them to do it. And because popular websites can have millions of people visiting them every single day, each trying to do slightly different things, that's a lot of thinking you have to do!

But it doesn't just take a big team of people to make good websites. It takes different kinds of people, too. Some people focus on what sorts of things the websites should do and how they should work. These people are often called interaction designers or information architects. They decide, for example, whether it is better to have a list of links for you to click on or a single button that you push.

Other people on the team focus on other aspects of the website, which make the site either hard or easy to use. Visual designers concentrate on figuring out how things should be laid out on the page and what colors, fonts and images to use so that your eye moves easily over the page and you notice the most important things first.

Some teams have dedicated usability specialists, too. Their job is to watch real people using websites to figure out where they get confused, what words they don't understand and situations when they can't find what they are looking for. And then they use what they learn to help the interaction designers and visual designers fix what doesn't work.

If all of that sounds like hard work, it is! Even with all of those people working on them, many websites still aren't easy to figure out or don't do what you want them to. But the challenge is also what makes it so fun. When you do create a site that people enjoy using, it is very satisfying. And if more talented people like you use your creativity to come up with new ideas, no doubt the World Wide Web will be more enjoyable, easier to use and a lot more fun!