Web Design Business

Professional Website Design - Back to Basics

You know what you want, you can see it in your mind’s eye. Now it’s time to actually put your website design down on paper. But you’re wondering where to start. How do you go about professional website design. To be honest it’s not black magic and here are some easy steps to follow.

Planning your website design

First off you should decide on the purpose of your website. That may sound simple but what you want your website to do will affect the design. For instance an informational website will look and behave totally differently from a product or shopping website. So write out the purpose and objectives for your website before you do anything else.

An informational website will be heavy on text, articles and advice so it will be important to keep the navigation easy for your visitors. A branding or corporate website will be heavy on graphics and should include the logos and branding style of the company. A product website should concentrate on simple navigation so that the visitor can easily find the product that they are looking for. This is the basis of professional website design

Choose simple website design

Now that you know what your website is going to do, putting together your website design just got a lot easier. It’s important that your website design is kept simple and uncluttered. You may think it looks cool to have a lot of flash video, graphics, pop-ups, rotating banners etc but these can take time to load (by which tine your visitor has already left) and make it difficult to work out what to do! If they can’t navigate around and take the actions that you want them to then your website design has failed. You’d be amazed at the number of product websites that have a shopping cart, but no way to check out!

It’s best to start out really simply and many professional websites are clean, easy to navigate and seem to draw you into the actions they want you to take (such as contacting you for further information). Navigational links are best set up as text so that your visitors know where they are going. If you do use images, make sure they have text associated with them, you don’t want your visitors guessing where they need to go next. You can always add images, animations and video later. That’s the joy of designing and building your own website, it’s always a ‘work in progress’!

Making it easy to get around

I can’t emphasis this enough. There’s nothing more frustrating that having to work out how to navigate a website. Most people read from left to right so ideally you’ll place your navigation on the left or right hand sides of your website. Most professionally designed websites do this and for a good reason! If you plan to target languages that read other than left to right, adding links at the top of the website will help with navigation. Some websites put their navigation links at the bottom of the site. Yuck! This forces your visitors to scan the whole page and scroll down to the bottom to find where to go next.

Good professional website design should allow your visitors to reach any page on your website in 3 clicks or less. Don’t force them to click and click and click just to get to what they want. Think your website is too large or complex? Even some of the largest sites in the world achieve this. If you’re not convinced, take a look at Amazon or Ebay. A large part of their success is in making it easy for you to find what you want, and take the action they want you to.

Give your visitor what they want

When visitors are on your website, don’t be afraid to tell them what to do, or what to do next. Act like a shop assistant and help them make the decision you want them to make. And when they’ve made it, make it really easy to take the action you want them to. Good professional websites such as Amazon and eBay both have a one click action button to make the action they want you to take as easy as possible.

Don’t trust to luck, test your website

When you have your professional website design all put together you’ll need to build it and publish it to the internet. Then you should have a few friends, colleges or employees go through your website to make sure it loads quickly, is easy to follow and there are no broken links. Do not skip this step! Just imagine how frustrated you’d be if the link to your shopping cart was broken and you’d made no sales! Now you can build your professional website!

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What are my goals for the site?

It’s important to know why you’re building the site. Is it for sales or marketing? Is it a tool for communication or an online brochure? Do you want to sell products through the site, or just educate consumers about them? Do you want to increase membership in your organization, or offer Web-based benefits to current members? Do you want visitors to email you? Call you? Subscribe to a newsletter? Knowing your goals will help focus your ideas for the site.

What am I trying to sell or promote?

Even if you don’t like the idea of selling yourself, it’s what we all do, every day, if we want to be successful. Don’t be afraid of sales and marketing. Finding the answer to this question will determine what are the most important themes of the site, what to name the buttons, and the tone to use when writing the content.

What is our website’s business model and how are we unique?

Even if you have an AWESOME idea - you should develop ideas for an advertising or subscription revenue model or some fundamentals of it.

Who is our target demographic and what will they search for?

To help us an agency understand your needs, can you describe your target audience in terms of socio-economic profiles;gender;geographical location; Planning for the search in your user’s mind can save you from retrofitting for it later. How would YOU search? How would your mother search? How would your grandmother search?

What will the information architecture be like? What are the important top level keywords?

There needs to be balance between information architecture for usability and keyword information architecture for findability (SEO).

What are the components to getting a website up and running?

1. Design & Development: The architecture of the site needs to be built. An appropriate look and feel must be designed. The copy needs to be written and any additional tools such as online forms, shopping carts and audio clips need to be added.
2. Hosting: Just as you might rent office space, your Web site needs to be hosted somewhere so people can reach it.
3. Upkeep: Once live, a good site continues to post fresh material, giving people a reason to return.

What content do I need to build the site?

First, create an outline around the themes you want to promote. Second, remember that each line of the outline is a page that needs content–text and images that will help educate your visitors. The images may include a logo or photos of people or products. Poor quality photos or bad clip art can make the most attractive site look amateurish; sometimes no photos can be better than poor ones.

Who will be supplying copy for the site?

Would you like asistance with this -

Who will be supplying images for the site?

We can provide this service - from using our experience to select images for you from existing library shots through to organising a professional art directed photo shoot for you.

Do you want animation and moving graphics?

Do you have an existing corporate identity?

1. What are the primary colours of your corporate identity?
2. What are the secondary colours of your corporate identity?
3. Should the site reflect your existing brand marketing?

We have an excellent team of designers, can we help by looking at your existing corporate identity to offer advice and input?

Do you require it to be optimised?

Again we can offer different levels of optimisation from recommendations of keywords, monthly monitoring service with recommendations again even including different ideas and include suggestions on google ad words campaigns.

Do you have a budget for this project and a time frame?

What will this cost for start-up? For ongoing maintenance?

You should also budget money for search engine submissions, which were once free, but now can run into hundreds of pounds. We’re currently recommending our clients budget ￡500 for this.

Ongoing costs include hosting fees and regular updates to your site (which is a good idea)

Do you have web hosting?

Our web hosting is on a Linux server, running Apache supported by MySQL databases, with web hosting you will also be provided with email and a login to your own control panel, this will enable you to administer your email accounts.

Do you have a brandable domain?

We can register a domain name on you behalf.

Is this an e-commerce site?

Or if not is there potential for you in this area in the future?

If this is an e-commerce site, do you have a preferred payment gateway?

There are many different types of payment gateways for e-commerce, all will charge some kind of fee for their service, some of the most popular are Paypal, Worldpay and Protx.

Do you require a content management system for product areas, news areas or a recruitment page?

Would you like to track and analyse your site performance and visitors?

How do I attract more traffic to my site?

Search engines, links, advertising and more. we will make your site search engine friendly and submit your site to search engines and directories on your behalf. You should create reciprocal links with complementary sites. Consider advertising on specific search engines, email newsletters, and traditional media. Put your url (Web site address) on your business cards, stationery, voice mail, and so on. Send out free email newsletters. Add a Recommend This Site to a Friend form on your Web site. Continually update and improve on your site. Reviewing your site’s traffic reports can alert you to what visitors are finding interesting and what they’re ignoring.

How do we prove high credibility?

You need to maintain your credibility. With ANY business or organization you are only as good as your word. Prove your credibility and make it apparent - don’t make your users wonder about it.

What ideas can we use for linkbait?

Why beg for links when you can convince people to give them to you naturally.

If we can’t create great bait, how do we buy, barter, and beg for links?

Sometimes you just have to know the value of a link and how to ask for it. Even if you’re the best in your business, you should still spend SOME time asking for links.

Where else can we advertise?

Pay-per-click, banner ads, print, radio, flyers, direct mail, television, billboards and even bathroom stalls are all options. There is still a multitude of opportunity with other traditional advertising - just be SURE to leverage your online presence (include and plug your url as well as special tracking urls like redirected domains) when doing your more traditional advertising.

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