For the right website layout you need to find the right designer, to help conceive, plan, and build your site. Many designers won’t listen - they’ll hoodwink rather than help - so it’s worth investing time finding the right designer.
Know what you want
Let’s imagine a good web designer. Let’s imagine a good website.
You’re looking for a web designer who will make your enterprise come to life online.
The ad-man David Ogilvy described the first stage of his process as follows:
“I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.”
Ogilvy is well known for his efficient method. Your designer should have the expertise not only to build what you want, but to help you find out what you need. Plenty of designers will brag about what they can do, but the right designer is often the one who listens to you, and has your interests in mind.
You may have drawn up a list of sites you like the look/feel of. Good idea. Showing your designer what you want is far more straightforward than trying to explain it to them. The more research material, the better.
First impressions – and crash landings
The landing page is the first impression visitors will have of your enterprise, so make sure yours doesn’t look a mess. If you know what your visitors want you’re already part of the way towards building a good website. If you don’t know what they do want, you are likely to give them a mess of things they don’t want.
Coco Chanel said something like, elegance is simplicity. How simple that sounds. Well, this is how you should think with your landing page. If your landing page is cluttered with things that aren’t useful, you risk people never delving any deeper. They’ll bounce off and go somewhere else.
But if you pride yourself on having piles of material, you just have to clearly headline and illustrate each morsel. In other words: if your visitors want plenty, give them plenty, but clearly arranged.
In a nutshell
The final design should give you not just a functional site, but an attractive and intuitive one to use. But there are no design commandments set in stone for webdesign – everything is a trend. The internet is seasonal and what’s in one year will be out the next, which is why companies have to frequently rejig their websites. This kind of re-robing is expensive, so scale your costs realistically.
Many developers quote for a basic structure with optional bolt-ons that increase in price. The long and short of this technique is that your money will eventually end up in their pockets. The smartest way to step around this is to make your budget very clear from the get-go, and get the best for your money.
One word of warning though – the main nightmare to avoid is your website going down. Crashes and other issues relating to unreliable performance reflect badly on you and your enterprise. To avoid these issues you need your website to be coded cleanly by your developer and hosted securely by your hosting provider.
Some lesser and greater spotted website designs
The phrase ‘above the fold’ refers to the area of website that is visible onscreen. Anything offscreen you have to scroll to look at is ‘below the fold’.
One prevalent opinion is that all your fundamentals should be on show above the fold. For instance, if you sell shoes yet don’t have any mention of shoes above the fold – you may as well not be selling shoes.
There are websites that simply do not fold at all. Instead they have a striking main image, with information accessed through a central navigation bar with punchy titles. This is pretty slick and businesslike, and typical of websites that are keen to sell you products.
Another design that’s more popular with attractions and events, where there’s the need to show lots of changing information such as What’s On?, the fold is used in a similar way, with the information above the fold acting as the striking main image and the information below being for more regular visitors to the site. You’ll notice there’s still a central nav-bar but it’s less prominent because the tone is not emphatically selling a product, but describing a kind of environment. There are examples that are very similar, but this time leaning towards a blog-roll format.
One trend that’s popular among people who want to show off their projects, such as architects or designers, is a design that dots buttons around the page, that can be dipped in and out of at the visitors’ leisure. The idea is to give an impression of creative diversity, and the spacious design feels liberating. As in all well designed spaces this comes as a relief. By showing each button in its own space it is emphasised and appears more significant. The same trick is used in radio when silence emphasises the phrase it surrounds.
