The discipline of web design has enormous scope. From colour theory to database design. But for me the most important aspects from an interface perspective are usability and accessibility.
Accessibility is the principle of providing access to your website content.
With all the different combinations of users and web browsing devices out there, making sure everyone can access your website content was never going to be easy! But you want your website to do what it's put there for. We aren't going to go into a full run down of accessibility here but the best way to ensure an accessible website is by testing it in real world situations.
The principles of progressive enhancement can be employed to ensure accessibility. Progressive enhancement exists because website owners like their website to be pretty and eye-catching, but this can sometimes cause problems for some users or browsing devices, so by progressively enhancing your website it works in the majority of real world situations.
Usability is about making things easy for the user when they have managed to access your website.
You will have certain tasks earmarked for your users to carry out on your site - you want your users to be able to carry out these tasks don't you? Let's make it easy for them. You can employ principles of user-centred design to ensure a nice experience for your users.
Creating user personas is useful way of putting yourself in the mindset of your user. Dream up some of your key users and give them a name, job, and task to perform on your site. Then imagine how Dave the plumber submits an order for 5 metres of piping. Of course testing on actual users when you have a working prototype is always good. Or you can even use free Google website optimiser tools to perform testing on your users when your website is live!
Please contact me if you would like to talk about how these techniques relate to your project and would like to ensure construction follows these conventions.
Quick skills run down for those in the know...