Laying down your web design for a company is quite similar to planning its ad campaign. You start out by making a budget, selecting your target audience, deciding on your site’s function and picking out colors and themes you want to associate with your work. Taking a structured step by step approach in planning out your site will eventually save you time, money and resources, whether you’re a professional or an amateur. Here are a few rough guidelines to help you get started, depending on how elaborate a site you want to design their relevance might vary, but they will give you a good base to build up on:
Who’s your target?
If you’re designing a site, you want people to know about something, a service, a product, a group of global activists… anything. The first thing you should be thinking about is: ‘who are these people I’m trying to communicate with?’ You need to determine a target audience, and then work your site around them. A very small example would be, if I designed a site that sold vintage walking sticks, I’d have a slightly larger font size than normal, as most of the people visiting my site would probably be older than average.
What’s its purpose?
Now you know who your site is for, but what is it for? Is its purpose to spread awareness on the spread of malaria in Africa? In that case, it should have video’s showing the current situation in Africa and also a system that allows users to donate if the wish. Or is it an online shopping site? It should have a cart, and an open spacey design to feature all the merchandise on sale. Your site design should be optimized t suit its function. This is why it’s usually a good idea to start a sit from scratch and not use old code or templates. It’s simply not as efficient as it could be.
Be simple and easy:
No one wants to come head to head with a brain teaser when they open up a site. A site should have a design that is both pleasant to look at and pleasant to use. Navigating around a site should be easy and intuitive, and all the necessary information should be laid out for the user. All sites should have a site map and a contact us page. Also the colors should never be such that they strain the eye when reading or using, and the font should be clear and well sized.
SEO to get people there:
Lastly, ensure that your audience can find you site, by search engine optimization. This one may need professional help, but it is crucial to get your site the traffic it needs to truly function. SEO works to ensure that all the elements that go in to designing your site make it well indexed by the search engines.
