3 Important Points in Website Design

When designing a website there are 3 things that you must decide before starting. If you start the process of designing before determining the answers to these three questions - you will waste alot of time and money. These issues are the foundation of the website.

A couple of things to remember - Your website is the center of all your marketing arms. Every marketing tool you have should direct the customer to your website. Consistency in presenting your brand is a major key to effective advertising. Visually all of your advertising and marketing should have some consistency with your website.

With those points out of the way - here are the 3 questions to answer.

1. Are you selling or answering? What I mean is are you a B2C or a B2B business? B2C will sell their products and services to their customers. Many times having an ecommerce site is a large part of the revenues. Presenting all of the products with descriptions and prices gives the customer the ability to make the decision online. B2B will provide the solutions to the customers problems. You are not selling a product or service you are selling a solution. Present the information in a way to answer the customers questions that solve their problems. They are not looking for a particular product or service - they are looking for a solution to their need.

Here is a good B2B website:

2. Layout - text vs graphic? Everyone wants pictures and video on their website. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it depends on your industry and who is your target market. The younger the target market the more likely video will be effective. If you have an ecommerce site then you must have pictures of the products and video can enhance the customers experience and will increase the chance of the customer purchasing. For B2B a video can be used to introduce the company and the individuals that work at the company. Remember - text is king in search engine optimization. You can optimize the pictures and videos with tags for SEO.

3. Color scheme? This should be the easiest one to answer unless you are completely re-branding your business. Consistency with color is one of the rules for branding. So when choosing a color scheme you must think about all the possible marketing mediums you will use and if the colors work with print, video, billboard, email, blog, etc. You do not have to come up with a color scheme that is unique. There are reasons some color schemes are popular. The color of the text on the background must be easy to read!!

These 3 questions are only the beginning of the process of designing a website. Once you have answered these - you are just getting started. However, you just made the process easier and more cost effective.

Take a look at some of the websites our designers have developed. http://www.davismarketingpros.com/portfolio/websites.php