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Website Design Tips and Considerations

By: Luigi Fidele

I will be moving to another city very soon to join a multinational company and the biggest problem which I will face is healthy food. I don’t know how to cook. I talked online to a couple of people in that city and they gave me a website URL which offered food delivery to my place on per meal basis. Can you believe it? They have a website just for food delivery and we are well aware with websites related to every small item which we use regularly in our life styles. Launching a website is like launching a company. It is your office which people will use to know more about you and your work. They will contact you if that website leaves a lasting impression on them else they will leave and won’t come back. They might even negatively promote your website among their friends. You want this to happen?

Cover of the book does impact whether I buy the book or not. Similarly website design does impact whether I will come back to that website or not. It is true that I might not observe the design again when I come back but the first impression helps me judge the seriousness of the webmaster towards his business.

People might think that a flashy website can easily attract visitors but they need to understand that not everyone enjoys high speed internet connection and a flashy website might take ages to load. It is always recommended to study the audience which you are targeting before you plan to get your site custom designed.

One needs to make a note of these points so that the website relates to the audience which the webmaster is targeting:

- The kind of Internet connections which they use.

- The number of hours for which they surf Internet.

- What are their searching habits and what are the stuffs they usually look for on the Internet?

- What kind of websites are they attracted to and why?

- For how many minutes (or seconds) do they stay on some site before clicking the back button or closing the browser?

Relating to these points a website will have these features respectively:

- It will load quickly if most of the visitors have slow Internet connections.

- The amount of content/images/audio/video will depend on the number of hours people give to Internet.

- The website design will be search engine friendly (CSS and XHTML validated) and include all the related items so that users don’t have to leave the website if they want to know more. These items should be easily accessible to the users via menus or visible links.

- An experienced Internet surfer might feel easy with a flashy website boasting many features but a new user will get confused with the complex website design and hence the webmaster needs to create a website design related to the audience which the website will have.

- The landing page of the website must clearly explain the purpose of the website and it should give a clear picture to the visitor about the next step which he needs to follow. A visitor will leave the website if he faces confusions to understand the purpose of the website.