Domain Appraiser | Little Mountain Web Design's Blog at 402WEBPAGE.COM

PART II: WEB DESIGN

Web design should give cohesion to all your thoughts and ideas for presenting your information to the Internet public in the form of a website. This next chapter will be broken into many parts. Today we will explore some basic factors to be used for creating a website, some goals and types of audiences.

1. What Factors Should One Consider In Designing a Website?

When you are considering your design, it is important to consider the following factors and strategies:

Purpose/Goal of your website
Audience for your website
Company/Organization name
Functions/action verbs associated with your company/organization
Branding strategy
Colors
Themes
Text

Choosing the right design and content for your website is very important and depends upon two major factors, your goals and your audience.

Here are some questions to help you get started.

What Are the Goals/Purposes of Your Website?

Websites can have many purposes as stated earlier. They can introduce/sell a new idea, product, service, business, or organization. They can be used to communicate with, connect with and provide functions to clients. They can also be used to help your team, business, organization, Internet community work or engage more effectively.

The type of goals, whether they are internal, for your employees, or organization members, affects how the website can be designed. For example your goal could be to increase the level of collaboration among your team, explain new products or services to existing customers, or introduce your business to new customers.

For websites whose purpose is more common, that of reaching the unknown Internet user, different strategies are employed including more explanatory text and search engine optimization (seo).

When you begin to create your website, you should start with your specific goals in mind and any other factors that may be important to you and create your own special list of goals. As time passes, you may change this list to better reflect your needs and direction. It is best to set up a time frame to periodically reevaluate your website, its goals and audience as one does your business plan to make sure your website is working hard for you to do what is needed.

For more details on goals and purposes please see our earlier article dated 17 January 2011. You can do that by clicking this link, http://402webpage.com/?p=25.

Who Is the Audience for Your Website?

There are many ways to look at your audience. One is to break it up into three categories: general, intended, and robots.

General refers to anyone that ends up finding your website. This person may or may not have an interest in finding your particular website, but they have located it. It is important when designing the website and creating your text to realize that not everyone may know as much about your area of interest or specialty, so some broad explanations are needed to help fill in some of the gaps, even if your website is only geared towards professionals in your area.

Intended is the specific group of people that you hope to attract. These may be customers, buyers for department stores, government entities, suppliers, volunteers for a non-profit, or just people with a common interest in your field.

The last type of audience you have are robots, programs that collect information from the web. This is important if you want others to find your website when using a search engine.

We will explain more of this in our next installment, “Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization”.

Please return later or read on for the continuation of this series and more on web design where we will cover an overview of search engine optimization.