The "Musts" in Web Design

When it comes to web design there are several basic "Musts" that need to be kept in mind - the Do's and Don'ts, if you would, of website design. Here are a few points you will want to consider:

✔ Design - it isn't about you: You need to ensure that your site caters to what your visitors like, not you. With that thought in mind, there are numerous things to avoid, and your web designer should not only know what these are, but should stay away from them.

✔ Ease of Use - make it easy to find your content: Visitors need to be able to easily see what you have to offer and to be able to readily get to it. Make sure your site is easy to navigate around.

✔ Copywriting: Too little and your visitor leaves uninformed; too much and they leave bored.

✔ Interactivity: One of the cutting edge aspects of web design is providing the capability of "involving" your visitors. A good web design should create opportunities for visitor participation.

✔ Technology - use it to facilitate meaningful conversation: Use state-of-the-art technology to determine your visitor's likes and interests by the way they browse your site, thus allowing you to "cut to the chase" when you do follow up contacts.

✔ Content - make it useful: "Content is King!" might be an oversued expression but that doesn't make it false. Make sure your page contents are relevant to your visitors.

It would seem that the above is all you need to know about designing the perfect website. The reality is we have just barely scratched the surface! For more on web design, visit Pathmaker Marketing.

Your Website - An Important Business Investment

A website is one of the most important investment a business will ever make. When designed and managed correctly, it is a most cost-effective salesman and is also the marketing real estate visible throughout the world, benchmarked against the millions of other websites online, so it pays to make the right impression.

The most important factor in creating a good website is having good content. Plan its presentation well. Understand and respond to the needs of your two key audiences – your target market and the search engines. Bear this in mind when your design your site. Your web design should strike a balance between the technical and SEO functionality, design aesthetics, navigation and layout.

Web design is now an essential element of overall brand positioning strategies. Whether you are an online-only E-commerce business or an offline business using a website as a online marketing tool, your web design and content needs to accurately reflect your entire marketing strategy.

Good Web Design Principle #5: Fine-tune Your Image

Have you ever had friends who never seem to change, never seem to rise above themselves, never seem to grow, never improve? Quality improvements and dynamic enhancements will always out-trump maintaining the status quo, particularly online. It was mentioned in an earlier that you should regularly change your site. You should update your site frequently (weekly or even daily) but no less than monthly, and you should consider a new web design annually. You need to remember that the Internet is a dynamic place. You need to constantly update your site.

Consider updating your site with articles, blogs, communities, and other ways for your constituents to interact with you. Maintaining the status quo will give you a headache, as will updates for the sake of updates. Remember your strategy and objectives and put all updates through a litmus test of whether or not they achieve the objectives or fit squarely into the strategy.

Good Web Design Principle #4: A Hard Working Site

Developing a hard-working site avoids the problems that occur when your website is all looks but no brains.

I don’t know what your dating career was like – or is like – but did you ever go out with someone who was a knockout in appearance, but 15 minutes later you discovered his or her vocabulary was limited to grunts and giggles? Many websites are like that too – all looks but no brains. And that’s a major headache! Here are some practical web design suggestions for creating a hard-working website.

• Develop an incentive based opt-in landing page to encourage people to sign up for your e-newsletter.For example, a well designed website will take into account the critical functionality required by your original objectives. It’s not just about looks, but about smarts as well. This refers in part to how well your site converts your visitors into useable assets, such as list, leads, gifts or sales. These are the names and addresses, both email and snail mail, of people who want to hear from you, or buy your products or support your ministry through gifts. If you send emails to people who don’t want to hear from you, you’ve got big headaches in store for yourself. So ideally, everyone you deal with is someone who has opted-in to receiving something from you online: your e-newsletter, your free information, your products, etc.
• Develop an electronic welcome series via an auto-responder email system that immediately sends your lead the information they requested. If your site is intended to generate leads, does it fully function in that capacity? If it does, it will allow people to interact with you by signing up for a newsletter or something else of value to them (not to you, to them). Your well-designed site will have easy-to-use pages that allow people to give you their contact information. These pages will do a good job of convincing the reader to give you that information. Follow up this email reply with a packet of information dropped in the mail. Have someone make a telephone follow-up call as the last part of an efficient lead follow up system.
• Have your critical info appear above the fold so readers don’t have to scroll down to find them. Create a good database for holding these names and critical information about them – typically called “the back end.” And one of the most important and most overlooked aspects of generating leads is having a way for people to tell others about your site: add Tell a Friend functionality. If the object of your site is to sell products, is your ecommerce easy to use and fully functional? Make sure all products have a photo and one sentence description. Make sure you have a good shopping cart system, and test it often to ensure that nothing has broken – so you lower shopping cart abandonment rates. If your site is designed to generate memberships, does it accomplish that purpose well? It’s similar to name generation in terms of the need to convince people to fill out a form, but your site needs to have a community feel if you want people to become members. Even though it would be nice to believe people will automatically want to interact with you because of your wonderful products, services or outreach, they won’t. They need to know what’s in it for them, and it has to be easy and fun for them to come back to your site.
• Make sure your web design allows for an interactive way for people to communicate with you. A church or ministry might want to install a Prayer Wall onto your site that your members can update with prayer requests for various issues of the day or items specific to your ministry. Let the content be uploaded automatically but monitor it in case you need to remove anything inappropriate.

Good Web Design Principle #3: An Attractive Appearance

This is the original blind date fear — What’s this person going to look like? They might sound good on the phone but it’s a different story, if in person, looked like they just crawled out of a vacuum cleaner!

First impressions count for a lot, and a website that looks unprofessional is a tough headache to overcome. It reflects poorly on your entire organization.

By contrast, coordinating the important web design puzzle pieces like Site Copy (or text), Graphics, Navigation, and Organization, you can create an appearance that is both attractive and memorable.

Great example: www.gmtiinfo.com

• Be careful to balance all your site ingredients.Too much of any one thing can be bad, plus overuse of graphics, bells and whistles can cause your site to load slowly if they aren’t optimized and coded appropriately.
• Make sure your site loads quickly. A good rule of thumb to follow is that you have 3 seconds or less to get a visitor’s attention. If the site takes too long to load, they’ll move on and miss your message.
• Stick with what works rather than reinventing the wheel. Major companies do research all the time on how people read web pages, how they go through the checkout process, how they use site navigation, and so on. You can benefit from this research without having to repeat it yourself. Preview what works for the major players like amazon.com, Google, Yahoo and others. One example of this simple principle is that people expect the main site navigation – or links to the other major sections of the site – to be located on the left side vertically, or across the top horizontally. Stick with one of these two approaches to site navigation, and visitors will find it easier to interact with your site.
• Keep colors to 2-3 complimentary choices. Too many colors look tacky, and too few look unprofessional. Choose an appealing color palette and use shades of it to create the appearance of more colors and to keep colors from clashing.
• Choose fonts carefully. There is only a limited range of fonts that will display online (in text) anyway, so stick with the basic fonts that work like Ariel, Verdana, Courier, Times New Roman, Geneva and Georgia.
• Plan for growth and avoid complexity. If your homepage is over designed, you won’t have any place to put important updates – and you should update your homepage regularly if you want people coming back. So, don’t get boxed in to restrictive designs, nor develop endless sub-page designs.
• Begin with a clean, professional design for your home page and develop 3-4 sub-page variations that flow from the home page design. A relatively small amount of investment in this area can give you an enormous lift in appearance and professionalism.
• Stay relevant. Make sure your text and images work together to tell your story succinctly and provide relevance to your reader. Have a reason for all images, and make sure they communicate your message whether they are looked at with or without the text. Same with the text – make sure it tells the same story as the images. Don’t use irrelevant images nor write irrelevant copy. You need both to be in harmony with one another to convey your most central messages.

Developing an attractive appearance overcomes the “Not much to look at” criticism in web design.

Good Web Design Principle #2: Resolve The Essentials: Domain & Hosting

Like the television commercial that showed a married couple who had to take showers in public water fountains, not having a home is a major headache.

Can you imagine the headaches occurring in this crazy scenario?
What’s your name, sir? “I don’t know.
Where do you live, sir? “I don’t know.”

To accomplish Principle #2, every website needs an address, otherwise known as your Domain Name or URL. Examples of world-renowned domain names include: google.com, wikipedia.com, flickr.com, and yahoo.com.

Choose a domain name that is your company name or brand, or default to the closest derivation, and get all the extensions.

First Choice:
a. Pick your company name as your domain if possible. (www.generalmills.com)
b. Pick your brand name as your domain if possible. (www.cheerios.com)
c. Or select both a. and b., but promote the one you go by publicly. What people remember you by most is where they will attempt to go.

Second Choice: (derivations)
a. Pick short domains over long ones, but memorable, pronounceable names over acronyms, unless you go primarily by your acronym. www.firstchristianchurch.com is better than www.fcc.com unless you go by FCC, then get www.fcc.com. Better yet, get both.
b. Consider hyphens as a backup or last resort option www.first-christian-church.com
c. Avoid plurals unless you can obtain the singular derivation.
d. If you select a derivation like Mysite.com or TheSite.com be sure to advertise your site as such.

Third Choice: (considerations)
Ideally, find a domain where you can get all priority extensions. Be sure to get .com first, then .org or .net as backups (contextualize to your country). If you plan to promote your .org then get .com as your backup. Picking up all extensions to a Domain gives you all entry options going forward (many people may type one extension or another, but can still get to your site because you have them all). It also serves to eliminate your competition from snapping up the closest variation.

To accomplish Principle #2, every website needs a host. Your host will be the entity that “stores” the files that make up your site. Things like text, graphics, photos, etc. When someone views your site on the Internet, the host computer “serves up” your pages, based on the coding provided by the technical person who programs the site. Because they “serve up” the pages for people to view, your host computer is called a server. What’s critical to determine before you decide on a host is what kinds of features and attributes you want your website to contain. For example, do you need ecommerce, databases, email, etc?

Resolve the essentials in good web design to avoid wandering around nameless and homeless.

Good Web Design Principle #1: Clarify Your Objectives

Conflicting voices are a major headache that can lead to standstill, gridlock and internal strife. Webmasters are often pulled in numerous directions for no apparent reasons on unreasonable timetables. But clarifying your objectives will eliminate these headaches and bring into focus a crystal clear perspective for your team of why you want to have a website. In order to accomplish objective #1, you need to be able to answer the question…

What is the Primary Objective of Your Website?

• Is it a store for selling products? (www.amazon.com)
• Is it a site to generate leads? (www.pathmakermarketing.com/seoanalysisc18.php)
• Is it for building community? (www.myface.com)
• Is it for serving your membership? (www.presidentialprayerteam.org)
• Is it for transmitting news or information? (www.crosswalk.com)
• Is it for improving customer service? (www.walgreens.com)
• Is it a brochure about your ministry or outreach? (www.pioneers.com)

It’s entirely possible that you may have multiple objectives. If that is the case, then further rank your priorities so that you understand which ones are the most important to achieve. Focus on accomplishing your top priorities first, then progress to other subordinate objectives. Record your website objectives on paper. Once you do this, if there are any changes in your website personnel, your new staffers will know the original thinking behind your site.

Learning this basic principle of good web design will surely save you numerous headaches.