subject: Design Factors To Consider When You Build A Site [print this page] People are all different and as the saying goes, you can't please everybody. So when it comes to designing a website for aesthetically pleasing attributes, their is no set standard that everyone will find the best. And this applies to cost as well. Just because you spend a lot of money on a site will not insure that it is held in higher regard than a site that cost less to build.
In this respect you need to understand yourself who it is you are really trying to please the most. Are you trying to please yourself and your creative abilities foremost, or are you out to please the majority, the crowd so to speak? Because in every target market or niche there is most likely a preferred form of design that can be optimized to appeal to the majority in that market.
However in trying to maximize your websites appeal you have to balance how well it will appeal and service your target audience as well as how well it will meet the business end of the spectrum, if that is indeed the case, that your site is ultimately business in nature. A business site as defined by this article would be one that is derived to make profit for its owner.
In appealing to your audience that will visit your website, appeal will not only be obtained by its appearance, but how user friendly it is. Visitors to your website would appreciate that when they landed on your site, that it loaded quickly. Content on your site whether it be textual, photographic or of a video nature must always be optimized so that the visitor gets that content in the easiest quickest manner possible. Video's and Pictures do take longer time to load so balancing the amount of pictures and videos may take precedence over just being multi-media extravagant with functionality.
When you build a site, you want to make it easy on the eyes as well. White backgrounds and text presented in a clean crisp manner will add readability to the site. Limiting your website from to many photos as well as stated earlier will add speed to the websites load ability and make it seem less cluttered. Making it skimmer friendly is advised as well.
Most people when they land on a website are looking to be interested quickly. They are skimmers by nature. If you break your textual content up in paragraphs with title tags this lets them peruse the page rather quickly. If you do this in an interesting manner your visitors may be so inclined to settle back in for some more serious reading of your website. What people do not want are tremendously long blocks of text that scare them away at the thoughts of reading them.
In adding to your visitors user friendly experience you want to design your website for easy navigation. This can be done in a graphical pleasing manner as well. You can have colorful buttons with easy to read descriptions showing them how to get from this point on your website to the next. You can use easy to follow drop down menu's to keep things orderly.
In designing your website be sure to include in your menu a site map, privacy policy, an about page and quite possibly a terms of service page. Include also a means of contact where your visitor can get a hold of you with any questions. In today's internet, not having these page elements could lead your visitor to believe that you are not safe to business with. Lack of these types of legal pages may also get your website banned by the search engines as well.
All in all it is very conceivable that you can design and build a site that is visually appealing, user friendly and very functional in your business objectives. Don't be afraid to seek out side guidance in this respect if you lack the knowledge up front. Use due diligence because there are many site builder tools out there are not very high quality. There are also some very expensive software's that facilitate building websites that have huge learning curves.
