Designing appealing, engaging websites for kids and parents alike

How does one go about designing an effective kid-friendly website? What are the things to consider to make a kid-friendly website appealing for both kids and adults?

Recently at Coalmarch, we’ve had the pleasure of designing several family and kid oriented web sites, which is a bit of a fun design break from “grown-up” professional business websites, so I figured it would be a good time to go over some of the basics of designing family and kid friendly websites as it differentiates from creating sites intended for professional adults.

Designing websites with kids or families with small children in mind is not so different than any other website in many ways. In fact, it forces you to think about distilling down the web experience to its basics— put the information that your viewers want up front, in a friendly and intuitive manner. Kids are becoming more web savvy every day, but they’re still kids and still respond to things like bright, bold colors, simple and clean design and high degrees of interactivity and feedback.

Even if the website you’re designing isn’t specifically targeted at children, but if you’re targeting parents with small children, you’ll still need to employ the same design approaches as a kid’s website so that the parents feel confident that you “get it”. Because like cereal and candy and toy companies learned decades ago, when you’re trying to target something towards kids, it’s the parents that make the final decision, but if the kids aren’t engrossed, they won’t bug their parents. Even if you’re not in the business of retail aimed towards kids, whatever it is that you’re trying to get across, if the parents find it and show it to their children and if it looks too corporate and grown up, the kid’s reaction will be “eh, whatever” and the parents will look somewhere else.

So what are the essentials of designing a website that’s family friendly and kid friendly?

• Content. Content is king and the first thing of course is to make sure that your content is appropriately geared towards kids and families. This isn’t just not having bad words or things like alcohol, tobacco and other grown up pursuits, we have to take that as an absolute given. But you do want to make sure that your content is engaging and informative enough for the adults to make informed decisions, but at the same time simple enough that the child can understand. If you’re selling candy for example, you’ll want to make sure that there’s the nutritional information but also some sort of simple, catchy hook that the kids can wrap their minds around. You don’t have to write your content like it’s a first grade primer, but you also don’t want it to read like the law books down at the county law office, either.

• Bold, bright colors and lots of images. Most children, usually having a more limited vocabulary than adults, will instantly get turned off by a web site with too much text. This is a good rule of thumb for any website, but when designing for children, it doubly important. Keep the text to a minimum and keep it in its own area. The kids aren’t going to read paragraphs of text— they want pictures and colors. Most households these days have robust internet connections, so some of the old rules about keeping the entire page weight to under about 100k aren’t as applicable as they once were. Don’t be afraid to use fun images in your navigation. Don’t be afraid to use bright, colorful backgrounds.

• If possible, have a high degree of interactivity and feedback. Many websites specifically aimed at kids are wholly or mostly Flash-based. This provides a great degree of interactivity, making the website more like a game or a puzzle than anything else, but may not always be possible or desirable. Even with recent advances in Google’s search capabilities, Flash is still lousy, if not often impossible for search robots to crawl and for this and many other reasons, you may not choose to go this route. However, this doesn’t mean that you still can’t make your site fun for kids. On the other hand, if it’s targeted specifically towards parents of small children, you may also not choose to go the 100% Flash route anyway, since you might not want to risk annoying the parents who would be the first person to Contact the site for the sake of amusing their kids.

If Flash is out of the question, you should still employ things like rollover states, animation and other ways, perhaps through a bit of Java script or creative CSS to add a level of instant feedback as the user moves around the site.

• Simple organization and layout. Many websites, aimed at whatever age group, have been on a trend as of late to provide a user experience that is intuitive, simple and gets users to what they want in the least number of clicks. This is especially important when thinking about designing a website either targeted directly at kids or towards parents. You will want to make your name and your branding extremely clear. You’ll want clearly defined and hard to miss navigation and calls to action. If your site is aimed directly at kids, you’ll want to limit your copy to the bre minimum. If your site is aimed more at parents, you’ll want to give them the information they’re looking for, but always keep in mind there’s a good chance the parents may want to show their children to the site to get them involved. Sometimes it’s best to try to think way out of the box and imagine that you’re designing a poster or an application screen rather than a web page. Don’t let yourself be limited by the stodgy old corporate websites that you’re used to— think of new, fun and engaging ways to present your information.

Overall, a good rule of thumb would be that if it’s a site aimed at kids or at families, if the site is fun for the parents, they’ll pass it on to their kids. If the site if then fun for kids, they’ll go back to their parents to try and get them to buy what you’re selling or get on your side of whatever it is that you’re promoting. If parents feel that you or your company understands kids with a great, fun, engaging web site, they’ll then feel confident that this is a product or information that will be good to pass on to their kids. If the site is boring and rigid and corporate, or too silly and poorly designed and unprofessional, they’ll direct their attention elsewhere. Because parents just want to make their kids happy. And if you’ve got a website that’s Advertising something directed at kids and it looks like it’s just for working professional adults, the parents will lose confidence that what you’re Advertising will make their kids happy.

So keep it fun, keep it bright, keep it engaging and keep it easy and intuitive to use. Because if the general rule is that you only have 2 seconds to grab someone’s attention with a website, for kids, it’s more like a split second. And you don’t want to waste that opportunity on a boring looking website.