A Good Design Can Make A Big Difference

If you can make your website a pleasant visual experience then users are more likely to take the time to learn more about the products or services you offer.

Whilst the design of your website will not allow you to forgive any other shortcomings your website may have it is always a good plan to provide your visitors with a site that is visually appealing. By providing a site that looks good and is easy on the eye you have an additional opportunity to convert those visitors into customers even if they have to work a little bit harder to use it.

Although we recommend spending the time to work on all elements of your website, you will find that even a simple refresh of a site design can help you to retain visitors for longer. Combine good design with a good architecture, build and copywriting and you'll be on to a winner for a long time into the future. There are many elements to good design and many different types of services we can offer, and we've outlined a few of these below.

Single Page Salesletters

For those in the Internet Marketing industry one of the key elements of your business is likely to be the single page salesletter designed to draw visitors into your offering and convince them that your product is worth buying. Although these types of pages may seem simple to create if you do it wrong you are likely to turn away visitors before they even get the chance to read your finely crafted copy and decide if they are interested in what you have to offer.

A good single page salesletter gives off a professional look to the visitor and makes them comfortable that you are providing a quality product or service at a great price. Utilising header and footer graphics, imagery and the correct font are all key elements of single page salesletters that complement the copy and allow the user to quickly scan through the content. Of course ensuring you have a compelling call to action when you want the user to buy is also critical to your success.

Full Websites

If you are selling multiple products or you simple want a corporate presence on the Internet then you are more likely to be looking at a full website design service. Although this type of service may seem like it could be costly and time consuming by following some basic principles we can provide you with an excellent design experience without breaking the bank.

There are a number of key elements that you should consider when designing a complete website with many layers of content. By examining each one of them you can be confident that when all the elements come together you will have a very strong web presence on which your visitors will be keen to stay and interact, eventually converting into long term customers.

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True To Your Brand

There is nothing worse, in our opinion, when visiting a particular company's website than not seeing the connection between their offline and online branding. The amount of effort that businesses put into creating a solid identity offline through the use of business cards and letterhead etc is great, yet on many occasions you can visit the same businesses website and the only thing you'll recognise is the logo.

Where is the continuation of the wider color scheme, what about the fonts etc? Why is it that when a company decides to create a brand they tend to neglect the Internet until it is too late? We are constantly amazed when company's create new designs that look great on paper but as soon as they need to be translated onto the web they realise that silver is not the best colour to work with.

In order to ensure visitor familiarity you must consider how your brand will translate online and at the very least stick true to the offline brand on your website to ensure people can easily recognise your site (try removing the logo and see how recognisable it is then!).

A Solid Framework

It's important that the framework, or common elements, of your website are well conceived otherwise you run the risk of additional page elements clashing and creating a mismatched experience to your visitors. What's the point of having consistent elements within your website pages that mean that you are completely limited creatively elsewhere?

While it's important that the framework is visually appealing it's important to remember that you can do a lot more creatively with other parts of the page and create a striking user experience, so be sure that the framework of the site is fit for purpose. Allow it to convey elements of your brand, but don't necessarily leave it to do this on it's on, other areas and elements of the site will excel at this too.

Another job the framework has to do is provide for site growth and flexibility by allowing the designer to utilise different layouts within the page body without ruining the overall visual treatment of the website. There's no point having a solid framework that works great when there are 3 columns used for content if it doesn't also allow you to use 2, 4 or 5 columns where necessary to present your content in the best possible way.

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Navigation Elements

A key component of any good web design is a strong navigation system that allows for future site growth whilst retaining usability for the visitor. You need to consider primary, secondary and teriary navigation at a minimum and on very large sites you may even need to consider additional navigation elements when you have a lot of information to present to the user and it makes more sense to split it into logical chunks.

A good navigation system will also provide visual clues to the user as to where they are within the site and make it easy to understand how they can move around the content. It should be clear to the user how to move from one section to another and also to content within those sections without having to go back up to a higher level in order to drill down into another area. There should also be clear visual distinctions for the user as to what parts of the page are links and where they have already been so that they can confidently navigate through the site either via the navigation elements or other links throughout the site.

Flexibility & Reusability

One of the biggest mistakes that we see when websites are designed is the rigidity of the designs and the positioning of elements within a page. Without providing for flexibility within a design you will find yourself constantly needing to create new page designs to allow for testing content, whereas if you allow for flexibility within a standard template there is no reason why you couldn't move elements around within the page.

If you decide that your contact information should be at the top right of every page but user tracking and testing suggests that nobody is seeing it then the ability to easily shift the content around will be an absolute lifesaver. There should be no need to have a designer create a new page template to deal with this if some initial thought is put into the design originally, and in most cases this is how we approach our design.

Of course you also want to ensure that page elements are reusable for different content, there is no point needing to have a different design to cater for every type of content you may need within a page when a couple of variations of a single design will do the job. You don't want to be overly rigid with the way in which these elements need to be populated either, you want the content to be flexible whilst remaining in tune with the rest of the site.

Good design allows for elements to be flexible and reused throughout a website without compromising the overall integrity of the site and user experience.

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Other Design Solutions

It's also important to remember that the web is not the be all and end all when it comes to design. Your business is going to need offline collateral as well; business cards, letterhead etc and what about the products you are selling? If you are selling products that need packaging then this is another area where it is important to reinforce your business identity and create a recognisable solution for your customers.

For those of you out there in the Internet Marketing business you will understand the importance of well designed packaging as well as online illustrations of your products. Selling CDs or DVDs then you need to have a distinctive set of labels and cover treatments, it's important to look absolutely professional with all of your products so that once the customer receives their purchase they are 100% happy with the quality that they have received.

Do not hesitate to spend time on creating properly designed products, the better they look then the more likely it is they will stand out from the crowded marketplace and lead to increased sales.