Strategic Web Design

Your Strategic Web Design Blueprint

There are millions of web sites on the Internet today with thousands more being added each day. The competition is fierce and in order to be successful, you must stay one step ahead of the game.

Although designing a professional web site is an important part of your strategic plan, it is only the first step. Before you begin the actual design process, you must first determine your overall strategy and design your web site accordingly.

Internet marketers have basically two choices:

-> Design a mini web site that focuses on just one product or service, with no other content of any kind.

-> Design a content web site that includes not only your products and services, but also information and resources that will be of interest to your target market.

Although both types of sites can be effective, your success ultimately depends on your site design and marketing strategies. Both will play a very important role.

Content Web Sites

Content oriented sites are sites that provide visitors with content, such as articles, tutorials, free ebooks and resources. This type of site attracts their target audience with incentives. Their products and services are mentioned on the main page with a link to further information.

Content sites usually profit by educating their visitors. For example, a content site focusing on dog grooming might provide a basic tutorial to assist their visitors in learning how to groom a dog. They provide this tutorial completely free; however, the main purpose for this tutorial is to educate their visitors and promote their products.

When you provide your visitors with quality information that teaches and informs, you are not only gaining their trust in you by sharing your expertise, but you're also building your credibility, which is very important on the Internet.

The key to using this technique effectively is to provide content that targets your potential customer.

Mini-Sites

Mini-sites are different from content sites, as they don't provide any content. They usually contain one or two pages and completely focus on one product or service. Basically, the site is just a sales letter for the product.

No matter which type of site you design, keep in mind, your web site is a direct reflection of you and your business. The appearance of your web site is the most important factor in determining your web site's value. If your site doesn't look professional or pleasing to the eyes at first glance, it's perceived value will be low. The perceived value of your web site will have a great impact on your success.

On the other hand, you may have a great web site, well designed and a quality product or service, but if it takes too long to load, the value will still be perceived as low. Why? Your potential customer will not wait -- ultimately costing you business.

If you're serious about your Internet business, designing a web site specifically designed to sell your products is an essential part of your success. Everything within your web site should have one specific purpose -- getting your visitors to take action.

Your Strategy

Prior to designing your web site, you must decide on the type of response you're looking for. For example, if you're selling a product, the response you're most-likely trying to achieve is to make a sale. If you're developing a content site, your main goal for every page of your site should be to lead your visitors to your sales page. You can accomplish this in a number of ways, including:

1) Display a graphic image of your product on your main page with a short ad and a link leading to your sales page.

2) Create a "Products" section within the navigational menu of each page with a short description and link to each of your products.

3) Write articles that focus on the same topic as your product. At the end of the article, within your bylines, provide your visitors with information about your product.

4) Write tutorials that target your potential customer. At the end of the tutorial, provide information about your product.

5) Provide your visitors with a free autoresponder course. Your course should identify a problem, provide advice in regard to solving the problem and provide the solution with your products or services. Keep in mind, your course should not be written like a sales letter. It must provide quality information written to teach and inform.

No matter what type of response you're looking for, your site must be specifically designed to achieve your goal.

Every part of your web site must be strategically designed. From your overall design to your sales copy -- each will play a very important role.

Your web site is the most important sales tool you have. A professional web site should be pleasing to the eyes, well organized, easy to navigate, load quickly and be optimized for the Search Engines.

Above all else, you must specifically design your site for your potential customers. Provide them with the information they desire, while continually mentioning the benefits of your products, and you'll reap the rewards.

Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility in Web Design

I was recently asked by a visitor to thesitewizard.com to take a look at her company's website, designed by a university student. I will not give the URL for that site, partly to protect the innocent, and partly because by the time you read this, it'll probably have been modified.

The site was heavy in its use of graphics with images adorning most parts of the page layout, to provide curved borders (to replace the sharp corners in enclosing boxes), different background images for different parts of the page, etc. It had a top navigation bar, driven entirely using JavaScript. The navigation bar mimicked the sort of menu bar you find in computer programs - there is a horizontal menu bar with different items listed. When you move your mouse over one of those items, the menu will automatically expand vertically. As you move the mouse cursor down the pop-up menu, the item beneath the pointer is highlighted. Click it, and you will be delivered to another page on the site.

In general, that site is typical of the kind of sites produced by newcomers to web design. It scores well in terms of prettiness and gadgetry (although only under one browser, it doesn't work well under other browsers), but fares dismally in terms of usability and search engine readiness. In fact, the reason my visitor wrote to me was because the website suffered a significant drop in the number of visitors after it was redesigned in its current form.

This article uses that site as a starting point for discussing some of the issues that a web designer needs to consider when creating a website that must exist and compete in the real world (as opposed to a site that is created merely to fulfill the course requirements of a school or university).

1. Appearance is Not the Most Important Issue

Over the years that I have dealt with newcomers to web design, it is my observation that they tend to focus excessively (and sometimes almost exclusively) on the appearance of a website. The site I mentioned earlier is a case in point: the designer tried hard to make the site look beautiful (and, if I may add, succeeded too - the site does indeed look pretty). However, as hard as it may be to believe (if you are a newcomer), appearance isn't the most important thing to look at when you are planning and creating your site.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying that appearance is of no importance. Far from it. However, in this article, my intention is to address the excessive importance newcomers place on beauty. In fact, if you belong to the other extreme, discounting the value of the appearance of a website altogether, you might want to read my discussion of Two Common Web Design Myths.

Having said that, your site can still survive (or even thrive) if it is a plain-looking site like Google. This is not necessarily the case if you overlook the other important issues in web design.

2. Usability is Important for You to Achieve Your Purpose

All sites are created for a particular purpose. Some were created so that their owners can sell something. Others are information resources (like thesitewizard.com). Still others are designed to showcase their owner's talents (such as sites displaying the owner's resumes and portfolios).

The usability of your site is important to help you achieve that purpose. The basic question that you need to address when dealing with usability is: can your visitors easily access the information they need so that they can do the stuff that you want them to do? There are quite a number of things involved in this question.

1. Information Availability

   Is the information that your visitors need to make informed decisions available on your site? For example, before they can buy a product, they will want to know more about that product. A brief one-line summary about your product's features may work for your main page, but you will probably find that you get more buyers if you can provide a link to a page that gives a detailed list of features of each of your products.

2. Information Accessibility

   Not only must your information be available to your visitors, it must be easily accessible. A page that gives a detailed description of your products is not going to help your visitors if they have to work hard at finding it. In fact, my experience is that if visitors have to work at finding something on your site, they are not going to find it. Either put the information right under their noses, or put a link to it in that place.

3. Navigation

   A good navigational system for your website is crucial. A navigational system is one by which visitors can move from one page to another. For example, on thesitewizard.com, one way in you can access the main pages on the site is to use the navigation buttons on the left column of the page.

   There are a few features to a good navigational system:

   1. If you are using a navigation bar or panel, standardize its location on all the pages of your website. Don't make your visitors feel as though they are embarking on a treasure hunt every time they reach a new page.

   2. In addition to your navigation bar or panel, provide short-cuts to places where visitors are likely to want to go. Don't force your visitors to have to go through your main page (or your site map) every time they need to visit another page on your site. In fact, put direct links in logical places - for example, on your "Products" page, you should have a links to your "Buy / Order" page as well as links to the pages with detailed information about individual products. Think like a visitor and ask yourself what are the things a visitor might want to know or do when he/she is at a particular page.

   3. A good navigation system must be usable by all your visitors. As a result, try to avoid things that are dependent on certain facilities or features being available. For example, don't make your menu dependent on a specific browser. If your menu is JavaScript-driven, make sure that you have an alternative facility available for people who do not have JavaScript enabled.

   4. If your site has a large number of pages, a site search engine will improve your site's usability. Not everyone mentally organises information the way you do. Hence a logical arrangement to you may not be logical to another person. Giving your visitors a way to search your web site will help them locate what they want. I discuss the use of a search engine for your site in my article How to Put a Search Engine On Your Site.

   5. It's always good to have a Site Map, unless your site has only a few pages. This allows people to have another route to the other pages on your site. It also helps search engines locate all the pages on your site, particularly if you use dynamically-generated links to your pages (like JavaScript-created links).

3. Search Engine Visibility is Your Site's Lifeline

As I mentioned earlier, the problem that my visitor faced when her site was redesigned was that it no longer appeared in search engine results even when relevant terms were used for searches.

The problem in her case was that her site relied exclusively on a JavaScript navigation menu. Apart from the links generated by the JavaScript menu, there were absolutely no other links on her site pointing to other pages within the site. Since search engines bots can't interpret JavaScript (at least not at this time, to my knowledge), they could not follow any links and could thus only index her main page. As a result, her pages were not listed in searches for her keywords (since only the main page was indexed), leading to a drastic drop in visitors.

This is a problem fairly easily fixed (for example, one way is to create a site map and add a normal link to it from the main page), but it illustrates one of the most important issues a real-world website faces: search engine visibility. If your site is not listed in the search engines, you're not going to be able to get many visitors, if at all. Without visitors, you're obviously not going to be able to achieve your purpose for the site.

Designing a site that is search engine ready is a lengthy topic, so I am not even going to try to address it here. If you are interested to know more, you can find some general principles for making your site search engine ready by perusing the articles listed on Affiliated-Business.com/promotion/index.html

Conclusion

This article is about the importance of factoring usability and search engine readiness into your web design. Usability is important because it improves the chances that your site will help you accomplish your purpose. Search engine visibility is crucial because without it, you will get few visitors. Plan with these two aspects in mind, even as you look into the appearance of your site, and your design will go far in helping you achieve the goals for your site.