Website Design - Passion for Creative - How to be successful in business

In this day and age, if you’re in business, you need a website; it’s as simple as that.

As a brand building and sales generation tool, it’s arguably the best investment you can make in your business. A website is available 24/7 to anyone in the market for your services or wishing to learn more about your company.

It can provide an introduction to your business and an overview of your services.

It can showcase a sample of work completed to date, a series of insightful case studies and a number of positive client testimonials. It can invite people to subscribe to an e-mail newsletter, read an online diary entry or download a white paper on industry developments.

Of course, there’s little point in building a website if no one can find it.
This is where search engine optimisation and management become necessary. It’s essential to select the right meta-tags (titles, keywords and descriptions) for key web pages. A pay per click campaign such as Google Adwords will also draw targeted visitors to the website.

What’s under the hood?

Visible - What you see
Your website needs to reflect your brand style and act as your shop window. First impressions count. The homepage needs to generate enough interest in your product or service for your customers to want to find out more. Think of your home page as an advertisment rather than a dumping ground. Excite your customers, draw them closer and then tell them more. Drip feed the information, don’t bombard them.

Invisible - What you don’t see
What’s invisible, or under the hood, is typically far more substantial than what the average visitor sees. These items have nothing to do with what the site looks like, but how the site functions; and mostly how it performs.

• Sound Programming
• Well Planned Framework
• Goal Driven Design
• Effective Maintenance
• Usability
• Accessibility
• Quality Assurance Tested
• Web Marketing Strategy
• Search Engine Optimisation
• ISP Services

We start with a strategic objective

We approach website design differently. We start with an objective in mind, then we look at what your customers need to know. We then look at how we can present you in the best way. A website should excite and inspire someone to want to find out more. It shouldn’t be a dumping ground for so much information that the customer gets lost. Your website is a marketing tool and should work hard at getting your message across.

Purpose
This is the crux of what we talk about when we’re up on our soapbox. You’ll hear us use the word ‘objectives’ a lot. Why do you have a website? What’s its purpose? How are you going to measure your success?

Design
We’re talking about things like colour choice, alignments, visual interest, and meaningful metaphors.

Message
Content is king. Every page in your website needs a goal. You need to understand who your target audience is and what you want them to do. Then you must provide them with the appropriate information and a meaningful call to action.

Architecture
How are your pages organised? Is it intuitive? Will your target audience understand?

Usability & Accessibility
HTML is still a coding language and it needs to be well formed and accessible. Not everyone who visits your site is perfectly enabled. Some people have disabilities, some have slow connections, some can’t install the Flash plug-in. Knowing your target audience and your goals certainly helps to set your usability and accessibility standards.

Online Marketing
Appealing to the search engines is a game. Get it wrong and you’ll find yourself banned. Do it right and you’ll be rewarded with lots of free, targeted traffic. It’s not difficult, it just takes experience and planning.

Technical Stuff
Is your domain easy to remember? Is your ISP reliable? Do they have 20,000 other websites hosted on your server? Do they support the right technologies for your website to grow?