With the ever-evolving technology, digital preferences, ease of development and user needs are also changing. We will examine the anatomy of modern web pages together and list the building blocks that must be present.
The ability of users to navigate the site comfortably and access the information they are looking for quickly are among the sine qua non of keeping the user on the site for a long time.
Let’s build the necessary structure for this;
A clear and simple navigation structure
It is a design principle that enables visitors to directly and easily access the information they are looking for and want to reach on the website. Navigation should be clear and understandable, and sub-items should be designed in accordance with the hierarchical structure. If these requirements are met, the user experience is improved and the value of the site in the eyes of the user increases.
Responsive Design
It is now possible to connect to a website from many operating systems, screens, tools and devices. For example, game consoles, smartwatches, monitors, laptops, tablets, phones, android box devices, apple tvs and many other technological devices can try to access your website. With so many operating systems and devices, the need to cater to different screen sizes is inevitable.
Preparing a website that can respond to all of these alternatives will positively affect your number of visitors, customers, revenue, brand awareness and many other things.
To list the main things you need to pay attention to ensure responsive design;
- Flexible Grid Systems: Flexbox or CSS grid structures are one of the main building blocks that establish responsive structure by ensuring that the content adapts according to the width.
- Flexible Images: With uses such as “max-width: 50%”, adjusting the width according to the container in which the image is located is one of the requirements for responsive design.
- Media Query Usage: CSS media queries that can describe how the page will behave in certain screen sizes will help you in this regard.
- Using REM and EM units: These units used for fonts and spaces play an effective role in scaling on different screen sizes.
- Use of frameworks: Using ready-made systems such as Bootstrap, Materialize, Bulma, Semantic UI, which make your job very easy in terms of writing CSS and JS, will minimize the mistakes you will make in terms of responsive development.
SEO Compatible Content
The only thing that will allow you to be noticed by search engines, move to the top and stay there is to have SEO compatible content. For this, keyword optimization, having original and valuable content, coding web pages with up-to-date code structure, making arrangements and controls that will increase the user experience are among the essentials.
Page Load Times
Since the first websites in history, the biggest factor affecting the user experience has been the loading time. Ten years ago, the internet wasn’t very fast, so pages were relatively slow to open. But today, some sites still open slowly. The reason for this is the increase in the size of the data presented to the users with the developing technology and the use of more tools and images within the site. Naturally, building sites that can respond to these requests is among the primary tasks of a designer or developer.
Measures to increase site speed;
- Visual Optimization
If you do not need high resolution and high quality images, using compressed images in JPG, JPEG, Webp formats on your websites will greatly affect the initial opening and browsing speed of your website. - Database Optimization
Increasing the efficiency of queries and not making unnecessary queries and transactions will also increase the speed of your site. - Setting up the Cache Mechanism
It is an application that reduces the unnecessary load on the opening of pages by storing frequently used and unchanging data on the page in the cache. - CDN Usage
It can be said to be relatively costly. It allows the content on your site to be distributed to different servers around the world, allowing the user to pull data from the server they are close to and reduce latency due to distances. - Minification
It is aimed to increase opening speeds by minifying files such as CSS and JS and shortening unnecessary code. - Lazy Loading
It is aimed to load the objects on the page as needed and in this way, the content is loaded piece by piece so that the user does not feel the load all at once.
When all these items are combined, the user experience and therefore the anatomy of the modern website is improved.
Security Protocols
Web developers have a duty to ensure user data security. This is also subject to legal obligations. HTTPS, SSL/TSL, data encryption mechanisms that strengthen the defense against cyber attacks are the main ones. It is also very important to keep the system and code up-to-date. Vulnerability scans improve user security and therefore user experience.
Clean Code Structure
Another issue to be considered in the development of sites is the cleanliness of the code, which means that it is reusable and easy to continue development when it is taken over by different people. For this, comment lines should be used and written with the correct syntax.