Website design and development
Commence with your objectives
Website design is about ensuring your presence on the Internet meets the overall objectives of your business. It is part of a communications strategy to achieve at least one or more of the following key objectives:
- Direct sales (for products)
- Sales enquiries/leads (for more complex products or services)
- To provide information about a product, service or the organisation
- To collect data from your visitors or customers
- To supplement other marketing initiatives.
These days your website is an essential communication tool. It must reflect your business in a positive way, and it must be well written and constructed. The website should be ‘mistake free’ as this can reflect badly on your entire business. The benefits of having a well-designed and accurate website may include one or more of the following:
- A local or worldwide presence—to create a good impression; or to beat or match competitors.
- Reduce costs—by comparison with alternative methods of customer interaction.
- Increase sales—through an effective interface and Internet marketing strategy, and can be used to pre-sell customers before they speak to sales staff.
- Responsiveness—your website is instantly available for customers 24 hours a day.
- Improved communication—detailed information can be made available to customers and stakeholders.
- Timely—new or changed data or products can be made available online quickly.
Define your strategy
Once your objectives are clearly defined, the development of an overall strategy can commence. This strategy is not just about design; it involves the process of determining how visitors are to reach your site (e.g. via a search engine such as Google, or by entering your already advertised website address). Also, we must understand what the visitors to your website want to achieve, as well as what you are trying to achieve. You want the right visitors to reach your site and to be satisfied on their first visit, or welcomed back for more. Similarly, you want to be satisfied that once the visitor reaches your site, you communicate in such a way that your objectives are met for each of their site visits. Your objective may be part of an overall strategy for ensuring visitors continually return—they must be made to feel welcome each time they visit.
Understand the psychology of the Internet user
As you can see by the above, we are not yet talking about detailed design; we are focusing on your objectives and strategy.
Now consider that if new visitors arrive at your website from a search engine, or via another link in, you have about 15 to 30 seconds to convince the right visitors to stay! A good design may assist, but it is content (information) that visitors are seeking first and foremost. Yes, a visual ‘Wow!’ factor may be important, but it is not always critical nor the primary objective. If the average visitor cannot see the information they are after, they will click the ‘back’ button within 30 seconds to trawl through the long list of other websites that meet their search criteria. That’s it—you have lost an opportunity and potential client, possibly forever.
Your first impression counts—it is as simple as that; and it is not all about design.
At Sunset Publishing Services, we understand the dynamics of the Internet, customer psychology and the hidden technology. New visitors to your website must be treated with respect and encouraged to stay through easy access to your excellent content. We understand and apply this knowledge to your particular situation to maximise the benefits of your website. You view your website as a fundamental component of your business and so do we.
It’s all about content!
As mentioned above, why do people visit your website? It’s all about content. We must understand what material is going to be made available on the website and how it is to be logically structured to keep the visitor interested and satisfied. The customer is seeking information, solutions to their problems, or access to products or services. At Sunset Publishing Services, we have over 20 years’ experience in publishing content. We know what works; we know what doesn’t work. More than most, we know about the correct use of the written English language, and about readability and typography for the Web. In fact, we are passionate about it. We have worked with the best writers, communications experts and editors in Australia, and they expect us to deliver quality content and layout every time.
Creative and functional design
Now we can talk about design!
Some people have detailed visions of their website—which is great; however, most people don’t know what they really like until they see it, and are better at indicating what they don’t like. We understand this. Sunset Publishing Services has access to over 1000 designed website layouts created for a range of potential businesses and organisations. This provides an excellent starting point to quickly refine ideas and significantly lower initial design costs! Doesn’t it make sense to start visualising your website from such a wealth of ready-made solutions and then tailor a site unique to your business?
Next we must consider how to structure the website such that data is easy for the visitor to locate. Frustration in not being able to quickly locate information is a key reason why people leave websites, even when the site is a good match for the customer’s needs. Information hierarchy is important when it needs to be split onto separate Web pages, and buttons must be obvious to the user. To improve search engine rankings we also consider keyword fine-tuning to optimise the presence of your website on the Internet.
Website construction
Once the content, design and structure are known, we can commence to build the website; however, you have one more key decision to make: how is the site to be maintained later? We don’t mean technical issues here—we mean the all-important information (content). Do you want Sunset Publishing Services to do this for you (we are happy to), or would you like to look after the information yourself?
At Sunset we can provide several options for creating your website. One is for us to use standard website development programs that require an understanding of software. The other is to provide a Content Management System (CMS) that allows you or your staff to easily update content on your site with only one hour of training and some practice. In this case we would prepare the initial design and layout and then finetune it to the point of being ready to ‘publish’ on the Internet. We would then hand over responsibility to the customer.
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