New design standards, technologies and techniques are constantly being developed in an effort to meet the ever-increasing demand for more exciting web designs and functionality. It’s a must for a web design specialist to stay abreast of the rapidly changing technology in the field.

You should realize that website design is not just a work where you can invest your creativity; it also supports the business goals. The end results of your work are viewed and judged by thousands of people. If you make a mistake, the entire company may suffer. Web designer’s job is to make the website both functional and pleasurable for the user. At the same time, a corporate website should allow for targeted marketing, thereby improving the company’s business.

Whether you work as an independent contractor or as a part of a web development team within a company, you need good people skills, imagination, and mastery of web design tools. You will interact with clients or other departments; take different forms of information, such as brochures, slide presentations, print advertisements, or other documents, and turn them into multimedia experiences designing a website that people will enjoy visiting, and which will help the sponsoring company achieve its goals.

Millions of children already use the Internet, and millions more are coming online each year. Despite this growth in users and services, very little is known about how children actually use websites or how to design sites that will be easy for them to use. Most website designs for kids are based on pure folklore about how kids supposedly behave — or, at best, by insights gleaned when designers observe their own children, who are hardly representatives of average kids, typical Internet skills, or common knowledge about the Web.

Children want content that is entertaining, funny, colorful, and uses multimedia effects. However, for homepage design and navigation systems, the user interface should be unobtrusive and let kids get to the content as simply as possible. Children enjoy exploration and games, but it should not be a challenge to operate the website itself. The content should be cool, but the design must offer high usability or kids will go elsewhere.

Another peculiarity of web development for children is that they click website advertisements. They often do so by mistake, thinking ads are just one more site element. Kids click banners as they cannot yet distinguish between content and advertising. On the contrary, to kids, ads are just one more content source. If a banner contains a popular character or something that looks like a cool game, they’ll click it for sure.

The idea that children are technology-masters and can defeat any computer-related difficulty is a myth. The truth is that children are incapable of overcoming many usability problems. Also, poor usability, combined with kids’ lack of patience in the face of complexity, results in many simply leaving websites.

Here are several types of classic web usability problems that may cause difficulties for children:

• Unclear navigational confirmation of the user’s location confuses users both within sites and when leaving them.

• Inconsistent navigation options, i.e. when the same destination is referred to in different ways, may cause users to visit the same feature repeatedly, because they don’t know they have already been there.

• Non-standard interaction techniques in web design may cause predictable problems, such as making it impossible for users to select their preferred game using a “games machine.”

• Lack of perceived clickability affordances, such as overly flat graphics in web design, causes children to miss features because they overlook the links.

• Extensive text is also problematic for young children, who are just beginning to read. Severe usability problems are observed when kids are inadvertently thrown into sections that are written above their current reading level. Also, kids are keenly aware of their age and differentiate sharply between material that is appropriate for them and material for older or younger kids, however close in age they might be.

So next time when designing your website for children, remember about this peculiarities.