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.