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Creating Effective Websites Part 4: Design

Design is usually the first and only thing a business owner thinks about when he or she plans a new website, and for good reason. The design is the most visible element of the site. If people don’t read anything on the site they will still form an impression of the business based on the design. A bad design is like showing up to a meeting with a client sloppily attired. A bad design will make a bad first impression, and these days if your website makes a poor impression, visitors won’t be sticking around for very long.

At Inspire Consulting, we frequently remind clients that the design is not the most important element of a successful website. A good design won’t make your site successful on its own. A bad design won’t necessarily ruin it. By no means, however, are we suggesting that design is unimportant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Along with planning and strategy, content, and visibility and accessibility, design is one of the four key components of a successful site.

So what are the factors you must bear in mind when considering the design of your site?

Get Help

The first is most important: hire a professional designer. If there is any room in your website budget (and quite frankly there should be, given the importance of an effective site for most small businesses) then you should find an experienced professional designer. Doing so will save you a huge amount of grief and will result in a website that does more for your business. A professional designer will be well aware of some of the other issues we are about to discuss, and will be able to come up with a workable design far quicker than you could do yourself. Ultimately a designer will be worth his or her weight in gold.

Keep it Simple

Whether you hire a professional designer or opt to save a few bucks and design the site yourself, there are some other issues that you should consider. Firstly, ensure that the layout is clear and logical. The pages on your site should not appear cluttered and the design elements on them should not be competing for attention with one another. A good page layout will draw the user in and invite them to examine the page closely. Keeping your design consistent from page to page will also help make users more likely to stick around and read the content on your site.

Be Consistent

The design that you choose for you website should also be consistent with your other branded materials, such as business cards, letterhead, and flyers. In other words, if your letterhead features a very conservative color scheme with traditional, serif fonts then your website should follow that example by offering a similar look and feel.

Color Coordination

But in addition to simply matching your corporate colors, the colors that you choose for your site should also coordinate with each other. Haven’t we all visited at least a few sites on the web with the most diabolical of color schemes? Not only does having colors that clash with each other make your site look unprofessional, it can also be very hard on the eye, and if your users have to strain to read your site, it's a good bet that they'll head some place else.

To Animate or not to Animate?

You should also avoid excessive animation on your site. Often when a business owner launches a new website, he or she is keen for it to look as “cutting-edge” as possible, and animation is seen as one way to achieve this look. It usually backfires. Animated splash pages are invariably ignored by the vast majority of users, and excessive animation mixed in with the site’s content will drive your users to another website as quickly as their mouse will take them. (See our article Animation: Is it good for your website? for more information on when to animate.)

What Not To Do

This article should give you a few ideas about how to get off on the right foot when it comes to designing your website. If you’re looking for more specific information, namely what not to do when designing your site, take a look at our article "Website Design – What Not To Do", and then sign up for our newsletter, Inspired. When you sign up, we'll email you a free report that will explain the five biggest mistakes most websites make and show you how to avoid them.

Overall

The most important aspect of your site’s design is ultimately the content that appears on the page. What you have to do with the design of the site’s layout is ensure that you provide your users with an environment as conducive to reading that content as possible. Commonsense will get you most of the way there, and help from a professional designer should take care of the rest.

Your website’s design should help to highlight what is great about your company and what is so interesting about your content. It should never detract from those points by drawing attention itself or by driving users elsewhere.

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