Blog
Web Design With a Purpose
April 15th, 2011
Have you ever considered that there is a reason behind every website you have ever visited? Maybe the text in the link you clicked was structured in a way that really caught your attention. Maybe you needed diapers and you knew Diapers.com was the best so you typed the URL into your browser. Maybe you needed local Chinese food so you searched Google for Chinese food in Gainesville, and clicked on the first link that popped up.
One aspect of web design that is extremely important to us is creating websites with the user in mind. A beautiful website could actually be detrimental to your brand if it doesn’t provide the function you intend it to. A beautiful painting hung neatly on the wall is nice to look at, but that same painting strewn in the middle of the turnstile of a busy subway exit during rush hour is an eyesore and a menace to anyone trying to get home. Make sure you are considering the context of your site and how people are using it.
If people are going to be searching for, let’s say “Chinese food in Gainesville” and not going to your site directly, make sure your site is search engine optimized so that when that person searches Google, your Chinese restaurant pops up at the top.
If you are trying to sell merchandise on your website, have big bold pictures of the items on the homepage to attract attention.
If you are trying to attract registration of new members to your site, set up the site visually so that the user first learns what you are about and then is led into clicking the “Join Now!” button.
Make sure that your website is custom-tailored to the type of user that you expect to be visiting your site, and the mindframe you expect them to be in upon arrival. This is why we consider the mockup phase to be the most important part of what we do. It is at this point where all the ideas are set out on the table, the user is identified, and we determine what we want him/her to do upon arriving at the site.
We are not mind-readers and we cannot know for certain how a person is going to act when arriving at the site. Our job, and the challenge we are passionate about, is building the site in a way that makes it more likely that users will behave in accordance with your purpose. Always keep the purpose in mind first, and the rest will follow.
