Designing a website goes beyond creating something visually appealing. A successful design project must incorporate aesthetics, business strategy, audience needs, functionality, and usability. These ten tips will help you design an attractive website that also provides business value.
- Outline Your Goals - One of the first steps in any website design or redesign project should be outlining goals. What purpose should the website serve? How will it be used? What behavior do you expect from visitors? These types of questions will help you define your business needs and form a design strategy. No matter how great a site looks, it's useless if it does not provide value to your organization.
- Know Your Audience - After setting your internal website goals, think about your audience. Your website also needs to provide value to your visitors. Whether its entertainment or education, your audience is looking for something and your design strategy must address their needs.
- Keep it simple - Don't overwhelm your audience. Avoid using flashing graphics and don't cover the entire site with images and content. Remember that white space can be an important element in design. Also, try to keep page content concise. Web users don't enjoy constantly scrolling to read text.
- Shrink it Down - Avoid bogging down your website with large files or graphics. Site visitors will get annoyed if a web page takes too long to load, and many will leave the site. Also, keep in mind that your website will be viewed at various screen resolutions. Make sure that your site is aesthetically pleasing at different resolutions and that key information is visible above the fold (user does not have to scroll down the page to view important content).
- Follow Accessibility Guidelines - Basic accessibility guidelines include: title tags for each web page, proper heading tags for content, descriptive anchor text for links instead of phrases like "click here," and alt tags that briefly describe images. By following accessibility standards, you not only make your site accessible to people with disabilities but also optimize the site for search engines.
- Be Careful with Color - When choosing a color scheme, think back to what you learned about the color wheel. All of the colors have different relationships with each other, and you can use this knowledge to choose proper color combinations. Also, keep your audience in mind. A website for business professionals will have a very different color scheme than one for children. Lastly, for text areas go with high contrast combinations for readability. For example, black text on a white background.
- Make it Easy to Navigate - Navigation menus and links should be prominently and consistently located in the same place on every page. Links should be well organized within the navigation menu so that users can easily locate information and navigate between pages. Site maps and search capabilities will also benefit your web visitors.
- Choose Legible Fonts - When choosing a font for your site, it is best to go with simple, sans-serif fonts for readability. Fancy, stylized fonts should only be used as accents (not in blocks of text) and you should avoid using too many different fonts on the same page. Size also affects content readability, so make sure your text is not too small. You may want to specify relative font sizes in your style sheets to better control how your site will look if a user adjusts the font size within their web browser.
- Be Consistent - Make sure each page of your website has the same look and feel. Even though each page will feature different information and images, the main design elements should be consistent throughout the site. The website design should be complementary to your offline marketing efforts, as well.
- Test, Test, & Test Again - Throughout the design process, it is important to test usability by gathering input from key members of your organization as well as members of your audience. After each testing cycle, make any necessary changes or additions and then test again. Remember to test your website in multiple web browsers, as different browsers may affect the look and functionality of your web pages.
Samantha Botello writes on behalf of
Guidelight Business Solutions, an Austin-based custom software consulting firm focused on delivering exceptional solutions through Innovation from Software and Science. For more technology tips and insights, check out the Guidelight Business Solutions blog at
http://www.guidelightsolutions.com/blog.
