8 things to remember before designing your website
1. What is your main aim and who is your target audience?
You always need to identify the target audience and decide what is the single most important thing the audience should leave a site knowing.
Once you know your target audience, you should identify the one thing which a visitor should take away from your site - this relates heavily to point 3 (the landing page design). You need to be able to concisely represent the biggest selling point or attractive feature for your product or service.
Using single words, short sentences or icons/bursts work fantastically.
2. What are your competitors sites doing right and wrong?
Identifying your competitors is always regarded as a high priority for any business. After all, if you are not adding any value to an existing product or service.. why would customers switch to your business? If you are providing your product cheaper then you know this needs to be represented clearly on your website and other promotional material.
Looking at competitors websites also gives you a chance to take a step back and put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. What do you like about the competitors website (navigation, clear information, professional feel)? What don't you like about the competitors website (impersonal feel, no search functionality, disjointed layout)? Many of these things are probably picked up subconsiously so you need to try to be as objective as possible when identifying areas of improvement.
3. The most important design - the landing page and KISS principle
All of your design decisions are reflected in your landing page (or home page). There are two schools of though when it comes to landing pages - keep is simple, stupid (KISS) OR give the audience what they need straight away.
Many marketers would say following the KISS principle gives you opportunity to explain the main features of the business without overloading the audience with paragraphs of information which they wont read. Following the KISS principle would result in website landing pages which give the audience a glimpse of the best bits of the business - SHOW YOUR BEST PARTS FIRST - with the option for the user to click on links or icons if they wish to view more information.
The second option is to cut right to the chase and give the user all they want straight-up. This usually results in a website with not too many sub-pages. There are only certain websites where this is suitable. One example would be for a website of a single product or service - so there is little need to hugely complex navigation.
The benefits of this is that the user gets the info they want straight away. After all, only a reduced percentage of visitors will click-through to a sub-page of your site.
The main disadvantage is the risk of info-overload and important information being lost on the user. There have been many studies showing people only skim paragraphs of text on the web (hey you are probably doing this right now.. so you need to accentuate the important bit of your paragraphs to make them stand-out)!
4. Color choice is critical
Colors can make or break a website. You need to keep a few things in mind:
* Use colors which your target audience will like. This is not always as obvious as my 18-26 y.o gamer example earlier. If there are no obvious color likes/dislikes for your target audience just make sure your color choices conform to the next few points!
* Don't use colors that clash. To avoid this, use a color palette such as those on ColorLovers.
* Test your color scheme by simulating color blindness and other eye conditions using one of the many online tools available.
* Make sure your color scheme represents your product/service well. For example, a fishing charter company will probably be best to use blues and whites.
5. Use hot-spots for the most appealing and/or attention-grabbing aspects
There are several articles like these which will help you understand how humans react when presented with a website. There is a distinctive pattern of eye-fixation when the landing page loads in front of us.
Our eyes are naturally drawn to elements such as bullet points, lists, icons and large typography. Typically this is also in the top section of the website so you need to make sure you put your most important "grabbing" information up there. As a user scrolls down, provide more information.
So quite simply, identify the hot-spots for your website layout you have chosen and put your most marketable headlines there (e.g. "Free to sign-up", "10-day free trial", "Voted best by PCMag.com").
6. What fonts are best?
There are the standard web fonts which should be used for large block of text - we cannot really get away from this fact. However, there are options available to designers to help make the design a bit more attractive than using boring Verdana or Arial everywhere.
* Image Headings - these are effective and accessible as long as you use appropriate alt-text. However, it is best not to overuse these.
7. Validate, test, fix... rinse and repeat
Testing should happen continuously throughout the design (as soon as you start coding in (x)html/css). At a bare minimum your should:
* Test in Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari
* Resize the resolution from 800x600 to 1280x1024
Keep in mind that sometimes when you fix one thing to suit IE6.. it will break something else in IE7 or Firefox. Yes its annoying.. but you need to test, fix, test again to ensure there are no nasty surprises when it all goes live.
8. Don't be afraid or reluctant to redesign
Once you have finished your masterpiece of a website, you need to expect (and listen to) criticism. This is the only way you will improve as a web designer. You also need to be able to filter out criticism in terms of things which are just personal preferences (e.g. "I don't like that color") and therefore probably shouldn't be changed and other criticism which is highly important to the overall site (e.g. "where do I go to sign-up?").
So after a few months, you should have a good idea of any tweaks or major overhauls that need to be made. It may be as simple as moving a certain aspect of the website to a more visible and "promotable" area.
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