We find doing things in odd ways not only makes things stand out individually, but also allows us to find new ways to present information or even find ways definitely not to ;).

It also means we test things ourselves rather than relying on so-called industry experts (see our blog post on SEO issues here) who might not have even researched any of the information themselves but be regurgitating 'common knowledge'.

We test and we try new things, on our website we will be trying oddities to see if they are functional in circumstances that may not be usual.

For example, a children's website for educational learning will probably require much different design to that of the standard corporate websites.

We have had clients ask for something "not too flash" because their potential customers get put off by the over-corporatisation of their industry, and something too slick tends to make them suspicious.

Essentially, different strokes for different folks.

Dropdowns

A lot of the industry has finally started coming around to the idea that dropdowns with lots of items are bad.

There was academic research conducted many years ago (~2005)  that showed that when presented with 5 or more options in a dropdown, the majority of users of software or websites would pick either the first or last option, no matter what they were looking for. This created a poor experience.

The same research showed several alternatives which worked better including megamenus which worked better than even dropdowns with 3 items in them.

Landing pages

Every page should be one. The only pages that should not be directly accessible from the main menu should be either individual blog pages (as there may be many) or member-only areas. DOn't hide your site behind landing pages.

Long pages

This is not talking about single page apps which are a bit of a different beast, but long pages (I know this one is getting long) where you want people to scroll down to see something.

According to Google, and numerous hotspot trackers, 80% of people do not scroll down unless the data they are looking for is already in view, or they have been intrigued by what is at the top of the page.