Who You Design For

Your Customers

This may seem obvious but is often forgotten. Beyond hobby sites, you are designing a website for clients rather than for yourself.

Whether you are buiding your site or using a designer, avoid personal foibles and if in doubt use a quiet colour scheme. Large, successful sites do so for a reason.

Search Engines

They do constantly try to improve capabilities but search engines are not good at reading many media such as flash.

If search is important to you, try to use accessible formats, with a few extras where they make sense.

An easily crawlable structure is key to the pages being understood, in terms of the code you choose and the physical layout.

Your Business

One of the most common errors in design is not to consider where a business is heading and only design for the present. Look to the future and avoid future cost.

Also ensure your site is planned to encourage visitors in the directions you want them to go. You wouldn't send a saleman out with no idea of how to close a sale.

Web Design Principles

We hope you found the video on image optimisation useful, poorly configured images slow a web page and the user experience. Google are taking more notice of website performance and this is becoming a ranking factor. You may have seen the Site Performance section in the Labs tab of Webmaster Tools.

Websites should of course be designed for users but helping Google understand and appreciate your site will increase visitors. Focus on a level of quality and structure visitors, internet browsers and search engines are all comfortable with.

This gives easy access to information and helps businesses increase their customer base. Few people complain about a site where they found what they wanted, even if the design didn't especially please them but plenty take offence at a slow, unusable, or off putting design, without bothering to look at the content.

As The Build Moves On

Enjoy your website and be proud of what is created, you will maintain the site all the better for that but remain focused on the purpose.

  • At every stage of a design, put yourself in the users shoes. Would you arrive and hit the back button, do you know what to do next, how to get there.
  • Is your website about trust, without that everything else is wasted and trust can be part of a design. Represent yourself as you are and people sense this.
  • Do your pages load quickly in every browser, are there slow features you could do without. Web users are not patient people.
  • 60% of websites lose more than half their new visitors within 15 seconds. Try to avoid obvious reasons and build in hooks on landing pages.
  • If you want those visitors to arrive at all, remember search engines. They don't see images, follow all javascript, or log in, make their life easy.

The same principles apply to search engines and people. Website design is about your message, establishing trust and providing visitors with an opportunity.

Web design is a complex subject to briefly comment on. Looks can count but are not the purpose, businesses build websites for business. We share this aim and are always happy to help, you are welcome to contact us at any time.