Website Design
Because you have (or should have) a marketing plan that defines your target audience and you have a rock solid corporate identity, putting together a great looking and interesting website should be easy – right? Maybe not easy, but it should be much simpler with those areas of your marketing already taken care of. If you don’t have a great logo, ask us about your corporate identity.
What Makes a Good Website Design?
There are several areas of website design that you should look closely at:
1. Aesthetics – This is the obvious one. A well organized website that is logical and follows the design of your brand or other print material is a good approach. Being consistent with logo usage and colors are important. Also, using images that you have used in brochures is a way to be consistent and allow printed material to work with the website.
2. Usability - This area of web design is not so obvious. Website users are moving at a ridiculously fast pace. Side tracking them in any way once they are at your site means they will probably bounce off your site to one of your competitors. Common problems are inconsistent or misplaced navigation, excessively long web pages with too much copy on too many subjects, navigation that drills down too deep into the site until users don’t know where they are to get back. That is a starter list. There are other problems that can arise.
3. Flash & Animated Graphics – There’s a time and a place for everything. Flash graphics can show up in a number of ways on a website. The whole website can be built in Flash. Flash is also commonly used as an introduction movie when you land on the home page. It could also be more subtle as a header to make something move. Those are a few examples. While these animated Flash movies can be useful on certain sites, they are most often overused for no real purpose other than someone thinks they are cool. Unless you’re in a cool business (like selling snow boards, hot rods, motorcycles etc.), cool alone isn't a reason to add a Flash intro. Flash introductions typically delay people from getting to the real content that they are looking for. Websites made in Flash can be very cool looking, but usually suffer in the search rankings when they are up against competitor websites that are well done and coded with CSS and HTML. If you push traffic to your site via print material and/or radio, and search is not part of your traffic push to your website, then building your site in Flash can be fine. If capturing traffic via Google, Yahoo and MSN searches is important, avoid Flash based websites, at least for now. The future may hold other things for Flash based sites and search results.
