Prior Planning for a Great Website design

Website design is simple in concept but it is the little details that will get you. Professional website design versus amateur website design can be the difference between potential customers wanting to look further on your site or running from your site and going to a competitor’s at first glance. So here are some helpful tips to remember when designing that killer site:

Start with a Simple Plan

Many times, a client will want their website to do everything right away. What will happen is the website takes weeks to build in the website design phase and in the meantime, customers cannot get the client’s website or when they do, it is full of broken links, missing pages, un-optimized graphics, and little content. If you r client you are designing for just wants to get a web presence, then stick with a simple 4 to 5 page design and then add on later. A 4 or 5 page design usually includes a home page, product description page, contact or enquiry form, and an “about us” page at the minimum. An initial web presence may or may not have a database and probably will not need one if it is a simple brochure site.

Remember that a simple plan is easy to implement quickly because in website design, you can probably pull some other design you did and make changes to customize it for your client. The initial simple plan will set the overall theme of the website in terms of colors, content, graphics, and navigational links. It may not have a content management system right away but your client only wants to get online fast and then take care of other details later.

Build Upon Your Plan in Phases

The nice thing about websites is that you can build upon them as you go. So you start with a simple four or five-page website design just to get contact and company information on the internet. Then, you can get with your client and plan the next phase with its pages and functionality. In addition to getting your client’s business up on the internet quickly, it also allows them time to get used to the maintenance part of it if there is content management system on the back end.

Whatever you do, do not ever have a link that leads to nowhere or to a missing page. Build the added page then install the link off of your main landing page. Broken links, missing images, and missing pages give the customer the impression that your product or service will be missing something too. Not only that, Google will rank pages with a lower priority if the bots cannot follow a link in order to analyze the page contents.

Shopping Carts Require a Credit Card Merchant Account

Many times, clients will want a website design that includes a shopping cart so that customers can buy a product online with credit cards. It depends on the services provided by the web hosting account but usually, a credit card merchant account is required in order to accept credit cards online. And that is something your client has to secure before you can even complete that phase of the design. So keep handy some recommendations for different merchant providers or at least know what your client’s web hosting account offers. The delay in being able to take cards online could kill a web-oriented business.

Some Final Items to Consider

Other items to consider in website design that are just as important as those described above are (1), identifying your target audience, (2) the main purpose of the site, (3) your client’s business model as it relates to the web site, (4) what graphics will be used and who is responsible for providing them, and (5) how will the site and content be organized. Remember that the more time spent in planning up front, the less time it will take to actually build the site.