What is the Goal of the Website?
Sit down and work out exactly what goals you have for your website. The clearer these are in your mind the more effective the finished result will be. Once you have the target in mind, work backwards and determine exactly how the site will form up to achieve what you want. If you are selling a product and the target is to increase sales, look at the steps you will go thorough to achieve this, e.g. attract the right targeted visitors, grab an email contact, send a newsletter or free offering, send repeat emails promoting your product, close the sale. Who’s your Target Audience? Determine who’s looking for what you are offering. If its females between the ages of 18 and 30, your site will reflect this and be very different than if you were promoting to males over 50. Knowing this should change the way you put the site together. You need to understand what the makeup of your typical client is and incorporate this in the site design and the experience it offers. If you have a broader target audience in mind you may need to ensure the site has a broad appeal, or carries different flavours for each segment. What’s the Competition Doing? Start researching your online competition. These are the other sites that will appear when you enter your major search terms in Google. If they have been at it longer than you they will have incorporated many of the lessons already learned in their site. This will save you the time and pain of having to learn the hard way. Study their site and don’t be afraid to use their best ideas, without infringing copywrite of course. · How are you going to position your site against the competitor sites?· Are they doing something well that you can borrow?· What pricing are they using? · What is their marketing strategy?· What principles are they using in their site design and why?· Go to compete.com and see what their traffic levels are The Written Message How do people read web pages? They actually don’t read them, they skim-read them, skipping from link to link, subtitle to subtitle, using the back button frequently, especially when confronted with large blocks of text. Knowing this allows you to adapt your design to suit the average web surfer psychology. You only have a few seconds to convince the visitor that they have come to a site of interest. · Aim for a simple, clear and direct writing style· Avoid long text blocks· Use larger fonts for ease of reading, but not too large· Break text up with shorter paragraphs, sub-headings and bullet pointed lists· Use a graphic here and there to break up the text· Give the reader’s eyes convenient resting points – bold headers, bullets, bold keywords The Need for Speed If your pages take more than a few seconds to load you are excluding a large percentage of your potential visitors. In this age of widespread broadband, we are used to instant access to web pages and some will not have the patience to wait long for a page to load. The page construction is one way of determining the speed your pages load. · If you use graphics, always use gifs or jpegs and minimise the file size using a good photo editor like Photoshop· JPEGs are good for detailed photos with lots of colours, but they lose quality when over compressed. Gradually reduce the compression until you get the optimum look and size· GIFs are best for smaller images, or images with less detail and fewer colours. Ideal for buttons, icons, or graphs. For smaller files, try reducing the number of colours in your GIFs· Provide layout information for graphics in your source code, e.g. <img src=”picture.gif”> this tells the computer that the page includes an image· Include image sizes in your coding, e.g. <img src=”picture.gif” width=”50” height=”25”> this tells the computer how much space to allocate for an image· When using tables specify the table size, for the same reason as above· Use the image at it’s actual size, this may require you to edit it beforehand· Using JavaScript or Flash for videos can make your site more appealing, but take into account how incorporating each of these elements affects the speed Navigation Visitors may arrive on any page in your site first, so consider this when planning your navigation. This is done by structuring your site simply and putting some thought into how visitors will find their way around your site. · If using a menu have the same menu system on each page· Use more than one menu so they don’t have to page up to select an option· Keep the menu choices clear, simple and easy to understand· If you need to use sub-menus ensure the hierarchy is simple and intuitive· If the site has a flow from one page to another, ensure all the links are obvious and easy to follow Other Useful Tips · Test your site on all the current and most popular browsers so you don’t limit your range of visitors· Ensure your pages are scalable to the size of the browser window· Check regularly to see that all your links are working· Keep all your content up to date· Spell check and do a thorough proof reading of the whole site Marketing Considerations When putting a site together the means that people will find it needs to be considered right from the start. Good site optimisation needs to be built into the layout and page construction. It is through this that the search engines will find your site and rank your pages. The better you achieve this, the higher your visitor numbers will be. Here are a few tips to get you started. · Determine your major keyword search terms and research how popular they are using a tool like Keyword Research· Check the keywords the competition are using· Code your top keywords into your home page in the meta tags, no more than about 20· Put a clear description of what the site offers in the description tag, use some of the major 2 or 3 keywords· Incorporate the main keywords in the page content where possible, but don’t overdo it· Do the keyword research for every other page you want as a landing page and repeat the description and keyword coding/loading process with each of them· Use graphics with keywords in their titles· What opportunities are there for people linking to your site? The more genuine links the better, but don’t use link generators· Where can you add graphics, video and music to offer rich content? Use the keywords in naming the media content. This will help raise your Google ranking, but remember the speed implications
Tags: effective web design, Web 2.0, web 2.0 web design, web design
