Friday, November 5, 2010

How to have a Killer Website Design

Web Design

A Good business web design starts with thinking about your customer and what is it that they are looking for? Internet marketing is different than normal business marketing because the web is an impersonal place. Always focus on ways to humanize and personalize your business.

Before you can start designing the website, you need to decide what the purpose and goals of the website are. What are the company’s goals? The web design produces a marketing piece. The Internet marketing strategies need to be consistent with the marketing strategies for the organization.

Business web design requires that websites be designed with CLASS. The web design acronym CLASS highlights the elements of best in class web design. They are Content, Logical flow, Aesthetics, Simplicity and Search engine optimization. Top business website designers uses a balance of these five key elements to produce websites that meet the goals of business owners.

Eye-catching graphics and style will fail miserably if there is an unfocused message or if no visitors end up coming to the website. The right planning combined with these five elements will produce a winning website.

* Content: Remember visitors arriving are fast paced, click happy and easily bored. Your website content needs to grab your visitor’s attention in order to get results. Content is what tells what you have to offer and creates a “call to action.” If the content does not provide the information needed it will provide little value.
* Logical flow: The organization and flow should follow the natural selling process. Organizing your website’s navigation may seem simple, but it actually requires a good deal of careful thought. One of the first steps is to establish the call to action. What are your goals and what action do you want visitors to take?
* Aesthetics: Develop that right first impression through style, color and simplicity. Design draws your visitors to what is important. Blending of color, graphics and design creates an emotional response to make your website memorable. Color communicates powerfully in business web design. Aesthetics bring in the emotional response that is so important in branding.
* Simplicity: Create a simple and focused message to avoid confusion and gets results. In design you want to capture the visitor’s attention with your message. With search engines, focus and simplicity gets faster and better results. It is important to get the visitor’s attention and understand the purpose of the website in 3 seconds or less.
* SEO: The perfect website without visitors is utterly worthless. Search engine optimization should be designed into the website. Web designers should chart out their SEO plan before beginning their design. Start with keyword research, create a keyword plan and use these keywords in page names, navigation, linking and headings to dramatically improve the design’s effectiveness.

A well-designed website has many facets, but it hard to beat a website designed with CLASS.

No comments:

Post a Comment