Website design is about so much more than pretty pictures. Information architecture and usability analysis are just as important as creative impact.
Before you think of the beautiful skin, you need to understand the structural foundation to your site. How should the information necessary to run your site be structured? How should the sections and pages be organised? At what point should users be asked to complete certain tasks? Get the bones right and the rest will flow. Get the bones in the wrong order and all subsequent work is going to feel wrong.
In order to feel comfortable enough to buy from you, your visitors need to feel like the site was built with their preferences in mind. Fortunately, there are commonalities in the way people organise themselves online. So you don’t actually have to build a different site for each visitor; just understand the principles of usability and how they apply to your website.
Of course pretty pictures and gorgeous type facing are an important part of website design. The visual experience is a vital part of representing your brand in your website. It sets the tone, creates the environment and presents your assets in the best light. Remember though, designing a website is not the same as designing a brochure.
Search Engine Optimisation is a tricky business. Generally it is split into two areas; organic listings and paid inclusion programmes. To be sure of getting the very best organic listings, your site needs to be built to be friendly for search engines when they send their spiders to visit. Sound too geeky for words? Fortunately good developers understand this; which means you don’t have to.
Chances are, you’re going to be working with partners to get the design of your website right. But no matter how expert that partner claims to be, you are still the one who knows your business best. A collaborative approach will get the best outcomes for your new website – insist on it.
HotMedia’s creative team are experts in website design and usability. They’re also really good at listening to and working with clients from all sorts of industries. Click here to get to know us.
Beautiful! Its slick and so well designed. Really easy on the eyes, I love it.
Keep up the good work.
M Morgan