Tips on good design
 A website design comprises of many features and these need to be considered before the site build. There is no right or wrong way to do this and therefore the key points below provide a starting point to help you develop your own ideas.
Here are a few tips before you start.
- Research other sites and bookmark a few that you like. This assists the web designer with the look and feel that you would prefer to adopt.
- Define your preferred colour scheme but leave the detail to the designer.
- Have a written strategy on your aims and objectives for the site.
- Clearly define who is providing the text and images for the site.
Now we’ll look at some design elements which will help to make your website stand out from the crowd.
Firstly its best to keep one design all the way through the site as it keeps the structure simple and makes it easy to navigate. The main point is to retain consistency as viewers feel more comfortable with this approach.
Once the basic structure is determined, you’ll need to consider branding, building the customer experience and imagery.
Branding
What is a brand?
A brand is an emotional response to a product or service, you can’t touch it but we all respond to brands and a quality brand name promoting established products can be worth millions.
Brands represent different things to different people and affect the way people make choices.
A strong brand can make a product or service successful; a weak brand can make it fail. Brand names alone help us to relate to a product or service. Read the words ‘Hilton’ vs. ‘Travelodge’ and you immediately start to understand brand values.
It is important for you to ‘brand’ your business so that your customers can immediately relate to your business.
Part of the branding process is the development of a logo that will feature on your website and be repeated throughout all your marketing material. It builds awareness of your business over a long period of time and differentiates you from your competitors.
A logo may simply be your business name in stylised typeface together with a motif. Some of the best logos are extremely simple and can be reproduced effectively in large and small point sizes in both colour and black and white.
In addition to the logo, it is good marketing practice to develop a strap line to support the brand.
Examples of branding and strap lines
Marks & Spencer: YourM&S
Ashburton Cookery School – Inspirational Cookery Courses
Hilton – travel should take you places
The strap line adds to the emotional response and helps us to identify with the brand.
The experience
Your website needs to appeal to your target market. This can be achieved by creating an emotional response to both words and images. You should appeal to their desires and aspirations.
In order to do this you may need to explore different creative ideas. It may be helpful to create a mood board (this is a board with cuttings from magazines etc, colours and ideas) which reflect concepts that will appeal to your prospective customers. This mood board could form the basis of creative ideas for the web designer.
The experience cannot generally be created by images alone. It requires good design elements, style and the flavour of your brand with both images of the business and supporting library shots of local images, people, activities etc. These all play an important part in a successful site design.
Photo images
Images play a vital part in a good website. Poor photography translates into a poor website; good photography can assist in the development of a great website.
This is an area where professional photography really helps. Spend some time deciding on the images that you will need for the site and prepare a detailed shot list for the photographer. Ideally you should have a combination of both long shots and close up images. Long shots provide factual information and when placed alongside close up shots, viewers start to respond on an emotional level.
Here are a few marketing tips to help you achieve the right type of shots
- If you’re an accommodation provider, ensure that all rooms are well lit before taking the shots
- A combination of close up shots and wide angle shots work well together on a website
- Identify shots that will appeal to your target market
- Analyse competitive shots that you like and ask your photographer to use a similar approach for your own compositions
- Ensure images are provided in file types suitable for both the web and print. You’ll usually require low resolution JPEG files for the web
- Have the copyright of the images assigned to you
Remember that the copyright for photographs is vested with the photographer. If you wish to use these shots for other purposes it is recommended that you negotiate the outright purchase of the copyright from the photographer.
In addition to your own images it is preferable to have a range of supporting shots which may include regional shots or experience shots of people. Many of these can be sourced from photographic libraries that can be found on the Internet.
|
