A
website design is one of the most important parts to marketing over the Internet.
It is the first thing that a customer sees and is the first impression. The
website provides all the information that a consumer might need in purchasing
an item from you. Making it easily accessible, pleasing to the eye, and easy to
navigate is crucial in your Internet marketing strategy. First however you must
determine a few things so that you can please your customers. I would like to
talk about a few things to remember when creating an effective website design.
An effective website design must first establish objectives, you must know determine
your target demographic, and lastly you must identify the navigation structure
of your website design.
First
things first when designing a website, you must know what your objectives and
vision are. Are you designing a website for the consumer to buy products? To
find information on locations, times, and schedule for business hours? Do you
want to create a social community for your consumers to discuss your products?
All of these questions and many more are things you must think about when
designing a website. You want it to meet the needs of your customers without
being packed with useless information and filler that can cause them to leave
the website without finding what they want. The whole point of a website is for
them to become customers, to do this you must make it easy for them. You want
to have roles and objectives for your website. Some objectives for a website
may include providing cost savings in promotion and customer service, increase sales
revenue, aid in brand development, generate sales leads, retain customers,
and/or build an online community. (Roberts, 2008; Ch.10) Creating and making
clear objectives and overall vision for your website is especially important.
Next, you must know your customer’s needs and who they are.
Web
designs need to be laid out to fit the needs of the target market and be easy
to navigate. “Ask yourself if the demographic you serve needs any particular
tools—maybe it needs additional accessibility with larger font size options or
multilingual translations, or maybe it needs to speak to a specific
generation.” (Kearl, 2012; prg. 4) It is very hard when you come to a site and
it doesn’t have your native language, or when you can’t find the link to
contact information and end up going through a few pages just to find what you
are looking for. The biggest advice that could be given to any marketer would
be to do anything and everything to make things easy for a customer. If a
customer has to take too long to find information or order an item, they will
end up going somewhere else. In our day in age our most valuable possession is
our time and we don’t have enough of it. Our time is valuable and we want to do
everything we can to utilize it in the right way. That means marketers must
make it easy for customers to utilize their time properly which makes it
essential to know the needs of your customers. Identify these three things and
you should be able to design to the needs of your customers. Clarify the
demographics and lifestyles that your customers lead, motives for using your
site, and tasks that they wish to complete. These three things will help give
you an outline of what you need to include for your website design. Lastly, you
must identify the navigational structure of your website.
The
first page of your website is the first impression you give to a customer and
is what will either keep them looking or have them looking elsewhere. Questions
you may ask yourself. Will the first page of your website have a slideshow of
your products? Or maybe you will have testimonials from satisfied customers to
grab the attention of your intended audience? Now that we know which demographic
and lifestyle we are advertising to we can layout the content that your
customer will be looking for. This includes everything from content, to navigation,
color, font, minimal scrolling, and graphics that will be included on your
website. You want to have easy access to links on the top or side of the first
page. “Your website needs to look
professional and trustworthy in order to create buyer confidence.”
(kooldesign1, 2010) Experts say that the most important thing is to make your
layout clean, crisp, and not overcrowded. The theory that less is more fits to
how your website should be designed. Personally my favorite way to have a
website is to first have something visually grasp my attention, my favorite is
then to see the things that are on sale or new products, then I like to see all
the tabs easily viewed and dropdowns of the different information that would be
subcategorized that I can go to for products, contact information, and reviews
of the products. The number one factor is to make your website easy to navigate
without going through ten pages just to find the one you are looking for.
In
the end, the most important thing is your web design. It is the part of your
company that they can go and see whenever they want for information about your
company and to buy products.
Establishing the objectives, making it fit the needs of your customers, and
making it easy to navigate is essential to the success of your business. Many
times a business, small or large, can fail due to their web design. Customers
want easy access and the ability to obtain everything they want in a visually
pleasing, comfortable, and clean web site. Doing this will bring in customer
flow and increase profit, and it all begins with that one web design.
Sources
Kearl, J. (2012). Web design
knowhow. Enterprise/ Salt Lake City, 41(40),
11.
kooldesign1. (2010, April 30). Youtube.com. [0].
Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbKYptEgMrk&feature=related
Roberts,
M. L. (2008). Internet Marketing. In M. L. Roberts, Internet Marketing (2nd Edition
ed.). Mason, Ohio, United States of America: Thomson.
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