Guest Article

How to tell your designer what you want?

After choosing the firm that will conceptualize your Website, you will be faced with the challenge of defining what you need done, and have the designer interpret and transcribe your ideas into technology. Your understanding of Website composition will aid the designerin serving you better. It will ensure that the project will be completed effectively, accurately and economically.

A typical Website consists of 5  major elements:

- Content: about us, contact information, privacy policy, articles
- Structure: sections, categories, index, site map, menus
- Layout: where to put the elements, structure, content
- Elements: text color, font- size - type, color
- Graphics: images, animation, color scheme

Content:

What is your product or service?  What makes you different from your competitors? What is your target audience? You should ask yourself these questions in order to have great content for your Website. On the Internet, quality is very important. It is directly correlated to credibility.

It's a good idea to treat your Website content as you would an essay. The text of your Website should be crafted with the highest attention to detail. Grammar, orthographic and punctuation rules will need to be followed to the letter. Appropriate vocabulary is also important to show that you are an expert in your field.

Care should also be taken not to sound too "sales pitchy".  Online customers don't like to be sold products or services in ways that might work with conventional  offline sales methods. The informational approach is usually best. Educate your prospective clients to make the right purchasing decision. Do this job right, and you won't have to worry about the competition.

Try to use keywords that are specific to your industry, but don't overdo it. A keyword repeated 5-10 times per page is sufficient, anything more could be seen as spam by search engines and could get your Website in trouble.

Make sure you provide your designer at least 5 pages of content. One of these could be the homepage. The others as a general guideline should include an "about us" page, privacy policy, contact us and pricing. Every page should contain a minimum of 250 words but preferably 500 or more.

Another important piece of content is your contact information. Local search is getting increasingly important in the eyes of search engines. Showing clearly where you are located will be well rewarded.

Layout:

Cars might have different color schemes, engine sizes, power options or brands, but they all share a common denominator: they have 4 wheels. The same goes for Websites. The vast majority of web sites on the world wide web use a similar layout. It's based on the banner, navbar left, mainframe, navbar right and footer. Customization is of course available. However, this is the most effective, accepted, favored and economical format.

Using this map will help you locate and organize where you want things to appear on your site:

 Graphics:

The graphical interface of a Website consists of images, color schemes and animations. These aspects of web design are highly subjective and are mostly left to the discretion of the client. However, some color schemes and image quality can at times be inadequate or detrimental to the Website's overall appearance and theme. It is sometimes best to simply offer a choice of 3 colors that represent your business the best. We will then draft a layout so you can see what colors will be used and where they will be located on the Website.

We can provide the images from professional stock photography or your can provide us with yours. Accepted format is .gif, .png or .jpeg. Images can be bigger and shrunk down to size. All custom logos, animations and graphic design can be done for you at a nominal fee.

Elements:

Elements are parameters that control variables of the site. They include but are not limited to text color/size/font/style, heading color, border color, border thickness, buttons and much more. Please remember that all options are not always available since it depends on the layout and template of the site. Let us know what you desire using the following guidelines and we will let you know what is possible, and what customization costs if modification is plausible.

Structure:

How will you organize your content? This is a very important step of Website design. Your information must flow in a logical and hierarchical manner. Ideas need to be defined, organized and classified. The best formula for this it the Grand Father > Son > Grand Son hierarchy.

All information on the site should be based on this model. Just as a book has an index, chapters and a glossary, a Website also has it's particular standardized structure characteristics. These should be adhered to in order to have a solid structure and foundation. A well structured site will also be a lot easier to manage for future expansion and modifications.

Bruno Vincent is freelance web designer who specializes in Joomla and offers free no obligation quotes.
Bruno Vincent
http://www.anonsolutions.com