Websites - basic principles.

A website offers the chance to engage a broad audience far more effectively than almost any other medium of communication. But it's also a medium which offers a greater than normal opportunity to bore or annoy your customers. That this happens so often is almost certainly a consequence of websites being built more from the designer's, rather than the end user's perspective.

Consulttheguru.com's three guiding principles for a successful website are, in order of importance, as follows:

Never approach the task thinking: “We'd better have a website, what can we say about ourselves or our product”, unless, of course, you have a product or service that everyone is genuinely falling over themselves to find out about. Instead, come at the task thinking what genuinely useful content you can provide for your customers. An example (albeit an obvious one), would be if you made a medical treatment. Don't just provide what amounts to an advertisement for the product. Go the extra mile, and make it the leading information resource about the condition.

If you operate in a crowded marketplace, and a competitor has beaten you to it, you may need to think even more tangentially in terms of providing useful content. In this case, why not use consulttheguru.com - we'll research what's already out there, and recommend ideas for creative content that'll engage your customers.

Too many people presume that all they need to do is publish their website, and the visitors will come flocking in. If your website contains large amounts of good, useful content, that is true to a point. Eventually, search engines, directories and other websites will find and link to you. But that can take years. Meantime, a website without visitors is like a cigarette without a match. Useless. So make sure that you consider how you are going to market the finished product, even before the first piece of code is written.

Designers will no doubt be appalled that we've ranked this aspect of website production as the least important. But it's true. Fact is that if the content is good, the simplest design will suffice. Design should always enhance content, not the other way around.

We always recommend that websites comply with the following:

a) Clean, uncluttered design which includes elements that naturally draw the eye to the place you want your visitors to start reading first, and then leads them logically from there.

b) If in doubt, website design should follow the same approach as preparing a house for sale: neutral colours won't offend anyone, and just about everyone can read black arial 11pt text against a white background.

c) A computer monitor is not the ideal medium for reading. People often skim-read websites. So, all promotional copy should be kept as short as possible, and text should be broken into manageable paragraphs.

d) From a technical standpoint, websites should be built for the lowest common denominator in terms of the target audience. For a broad audience, that means it should be visible on an 800 by 600 resolution monitor (yes, really), load quickly using a 56K dial-up connection, and use only ubiquitous graphic formats.

e) Under no circumstances include:

• Pop up advertising
• Flash-animated introductions
• Animated gifs (unless they are discreet and serve a real purpose).

 

Last updated: February 2007

Related Marketing Advice From Consulttheguru.com:

• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Search engine optimisation (SEO)
• Search engine optimisation checklist
• Inbound links
• Converting website visitors to sales
• Consult the Guru for content ideas for your website