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aressindiaseo
18 Apr 2009, 07:50 AM
A website is the face of the business in the online world. Have you ever paid attention towards whether it represents your business in an effective and profitable manner in the online world? If not, its time to discuss few factors which impact the chances of success of a website.

The goal of a website is to sell something, persuade, invite, and attract people to come in and spend some time within its confines. To achieve this goal designer must avoid confusion and unnecessary complex design. They must not use any element which will distract the user from the basic purpose of the site. A simple and informative site will outperform a complex one anytime.

There is so much more to website design than just making a few web pages look pretty if you want to succeed. You need to consider your target audience, underlying message, content, desired responses, visitor impact, online goals, how you are going to measure the success of the site and more.

Lets discuss few factors which will help in achieving the exact purpose of the site.

1. Aim or objective of the site : The website should have a specific objective. Website developers should have proper understanding of the exact purpose of the site so accordingly they can decide what content should be included, what messages should be communicated to visitors.

Quiet often designers get tempted and end up adding all kinds of new features, special effects and building fancy websites, but sometimes such overload can produce a jumbled message to visitors that leads to a confusion. So during development it is very important to achieve clarity which will help visitors in getting what they are looking for. For eg. a E-commerce site needs to clearly communicate the visitors about their products, what they can purchace and why they should purchace from their website. Similarly a service providers site needs clarity when they are communicating details of their services to visitors.

Your objective can be achieved through simplicity. Cutting out extra clutter on a website can make the primary message more easily understood by visitors.

2. Site should be User Friendly : Most of the internet users are impatient. If they don’t find quickly what they are looking for, they will simply leave. A site will serve its purpose more effectively if the site is user friendly. If you want to have long term benefits its usability matters and not the design and appearance.

The usability needs of a site will partially depend on the nature of the site. For example, a large e-commerce site must have an effective search function, logical categorization of products for browsing, a user-friendly shopping cart, etc. A Service providers site should list their services in a detailed manner after going through which, the customer should be able to pick the service and contact the concerned person easily. The whole process should be hasselfree to encourage repeat visitors.

3. Navigation : In addition to providing visitors with an easy way to move through the site, navigation is often used by designers to create more visually-appealing websites. Although navigation provides designers with a great opportunity to improve the look of the site, attractiveness should not come at the expense of usability and accessibility.

While developing links web developers should think about which pages are most likely to be visited by visitors and which pages are critical for the purpose of the site. Link location also plays a vital part, we must consider how many clicks it will take a visitors to get from the homepage to any other specific page.

4. Appearance : Last but not the list the overall appearance of the site plays a major role in achieving the success of the site. Your website design should complement the content of the site. Such websites helps in keeping visitors on your site longer and maybe even bookmark your site for future visits.

Website design trends keeps on changing so if you don’t redesign your site in every 2 years it will look outdated and new visitors will not show much interest in it. So it is important to give your site a fresh look after every couple of years.

Not every site needs to be a award winner. But the site which succeeds in achieving its goal in a well designed manner is surely a winner in its own respect.

Please check one such winning example here, It's our unique and creative design studio http://www.websitedesign.in :)

Vaishali
http://www.websitedesign.in

The Graphics MD
18 Apr 2009, 11:39 AM
Good post -

You brought up some very true points. Web design definitely has a lot of things needs in it to be successful. What I usually do is try to find out as much as possible from our web clients as to what they are looking for, the point of what they are hoping to achieve with their website, and also if they have any website examples that they know of that they are hoping for something similar.

Unfortunately clients are clients, and not many of them know exactly what they want. Most of the clients that come to my company seek consulting and recommendations on what their website should and could have. That makes it a little easier on the designers as it might give us more freedom to do things as we would like, but also we have to be careful and make sure it doesn't fail.

Design is yes, something that you want to let yourself free and go with all your creative impulses and such and do something that is new and different and never done before, but we have to remember that it isn't always the case when it comes to who we are designing for. There are a number of designs and work that I have put out there that I am not proud of but the client loved it, it hurts but sometimes thats the way it goes.

I definitely agree with the redesign your site every 2 years thing though - I am actually in the middle of redesigning our company website and am hoping to give it a look that is fresh and keeping up with the times.

Again good post and it's good to remind people out there that there is so much that goes into Web Design.