Articles
How to Plan an Effective Website
What Is a Good Website?
A website should enhance your brand image.
A dynamic and visual tool for visitors and clients to learn about your business, service or project and to contact you.
A way of regularly updating clients on your products, services, changes in your business and information on your area of expertise.
A tool for adding value to your service for your clients.
A way of displaying references and testimonials so clients can trust in your service.
A clear statement of what benefits your clients will have working with you.
Preparing Your Web Content for Your Target Audience
Good web content should be aimed at your target audience.
Think about:
- who will be reading the website – current clients or potential clients, others in the same profession, etc.;
- how they will benefit from your service - what your service can do for them; and
- what they need to know and how to express this and show this.
Organising the Content
Think about the content of each page and how many pages you want to have.
You can always add more pages and content later. Keep each page simple.
Text
Write clear, concise and relevant text in short chunks.
Include headings for the subject of each paragraph and page.
Use lists and bullet points to break up text.
Clearly identify the service you provide and repeat key phrases which describe your service succinctly. Emphasise any speciality services which make you different from other service providers. The more specific your key phrases are about your unique selling point, the more chance your website has of being visible to the people you want to find it.
Using these techniques will help guide visitors. It also helps search engines recognise the themes of each page and your key services. This increases your chance of being near the top of search lists.
Images
Each page should include images for visual impact. This can include your logo if you have one.
Images should be provided to your web designer in .gif, or .png or .jpg format to help load pages quickly.
A professional photograph will give a better impression. A graphic designer and some web designers can design images which are not photographs: icons, symbols, graphics, etc.
Keep images for each theme the same size if possible to help the design process.
Colours
Think about the colours you want to have. You may want to use the colours of your logo.
It is a good idea to have about 5 or 6 colours for the website to use for text, links, borders, background images and navigation bars. See Colour Lovers palette creator for ideas.