By
Subhashish Bose
Submitted On July 10, 2014
The designing of every website needs to begin keeping the
audience in mind and the same is true for children sites as well. The
first point to think about during the design of children site is to
consider the age and gender. For example, it becomes a challenge while
designing a website for seven to 12 year olds to ensure that the
youngest boys who find reading less appealing are as engrossed by the
site as tween sisters who are probably more inclined to use Twitter.
In general, during the creation of online content for under- 12s, is important to keep it simple. This age group finds it difficult to comprehend wordplay and find it repulsive to read wordplay and 'hidden' contents.
The main driver of this age group to go online is playing games and having lots of them works wonder to keep them engrossed. Thee under-nines are often driven by character and TV shows, including cartoons and TV characters and are an easy way for navigation.
Aspiration
The over-sevens kids will find aspiration-sites more appealing, especially the older tween girls with more of bold imagery and one-word call to action, so that younger children do not get repulsed. This age group generally has good mouse skills and find scrolling an easy affair but prefer to have enough area for clicking the mouse without any need to copy too much to navigate.
Reading abilities
The importance of usability is very important when designing for children. Mere practicing on its own is not enough. Reading and writing is an important consideration while designing websites. The skills of a seven year-old boy are very different compared to an 11 year-old girl. The under-nines have poor hold on literacy and when introducing a search function, it would do well to include an auto-complete function, options for misspelling and incorporating images for each successful search result.
Navigation
The way children find content does not have a unique answer, so kids' sites often provide a variety of navigational means. The younger kids find it easy to go for image and character-based navigation. It is not recommended to use rotating or slideshow image. Children often fail to understand how to click through while searching other images and contents.
Although
mouse skill is easy with children aged seven and over, but it is wiser
to make navigation arrows stocky and clear. For pre-school kids, it
would do well to have large arrows and make them easily clickable, but
for over-sevens the arrows need to be large for them to understand their
functions. Many kids are easy with Back button on the browser, but with
multiple tabs open, these kids find these confusing.
Video
It should be noted that kids are equally adept in the use of Google and YouTube as are teenagers and adults. So kids easily understand and use the 'related content' links of YouTube.
In general, during the creation of online content for under- 12s, is important to keep it simple. This age group finds it difficult to comprehend wordplay and find it repulsive to read wordplay and 'hidden' contents.
The main driver of this age group to go online is playing games and having lots of them works wonder to keep them engrossed. Thee under-nines are often driven by character and TV shows, including cartoons and TV characters and are an easy way for navigation.
Aspiration
The over-sevens kids will find aspiration-sites more appealing, especially the older tween girls with more of bold imagery and one-word call to action, so that younger children do not get repulsed. This age group generally has good mouse skills and find scrolling an easy affair but prefer to have enough area for clicking the mouse without any need to copy too much to navigate.
Reading abilities
The importance of usability is very important when designing for children. Mere practicing on its own is not enough. Reading and writing is an important consideration while designing websites. The skills of a seven year-old boy are very different compared to an 11 year-old girl. The under-nines have poor hold on literacy and when introducing a search function, it would do well to include an auto-complete function, options for misspelling and incorporating images for each successful search result.
Navigation
The way children find content does not have a unique answer, so kids' sites often provide a variety of navigational means. The younger kids find it easy to go for image and character-based navigation. It is not recommended to use rotating or slideshow image. Children often fail to understand how to click through while searching other images and contents.
Video
It should be noted that kids are equally adept in the use of Google and YouTube as are teenagers and adults. So kids easily understand and use the 'related content' links of YouTube.
Subhashish Bose enjoys writing about a variety of topics. Here he writes about Zoom Web Media, a well-known web design and development company based in Sydney.
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