Are you projecting the right image?

Every business has its corporate image; what the letterhead looks like; what publicity you are currently doing.

What colours and type font you like; bearing in mind that on the Internet a type face probably comes out either Times New Roman or Arial, and is best if black or navy on white or pale pastel shades. Generally bright colours for a children's site, subdued ones for business.

You have a choice.
We can work with FrontPage and painlessly create glossy websites with lots of mouseover, movement, and animation.
Or we can concentrate on sites with strong content and instant loading with a sole aim to sell product.
We ask you, the customer what you want!

And sometimes we work for PR consultants who tell us EXACTLY how it has got to look. We are grateful for such contributions because they have obviously spent the time to think it through.

There is this conflict.
Either it is slow to load and glossy.
Or quick to load, factual, and a bit dull.

We know that people are buying the latest £1000 PC's and have big display screens. And some have fast ADSL lines. And yes they can handle the music and dancing.

But up to 80% of the visitors have 640 x 480 displays or have displays set with a window of about this size, and boring dial-up modems, and slow processors.

>> More on Usability

WHO ARE THE TARGET AUDIENCE

Websites for business, for consumers, for entertainment, for leisure, for youth, for government - all these have different visitors and very different images to project. What sort of audience do you want to address?

The trick is to identify each type of person who may visit your website, then to predict what they will be looking for. Each type could be looking for several different things.

Then to make sure that each type, and each purpose is easily achieved - the several paths through your website are clear and clean and the visitor has a valuable and pleasant surfing experience.

This is often not very easy to achieve. But predicting visitors needs will govern the structure of the website, and the design of the homepage.

WHAT ABOUT THE SEARCH ENGINES

Getting noticed by search engines may be important to you - and that imposes a whole range of additional constraints. A big subject discussed elsewhere on this website.

>>> More on Promoting

Not least of the problems is that some current design features are definitely counter-productive.

A Flash entrance tunnel is just eye candy, slow to load, difficult for the search engines, and will lose all visitors who are in a hurry to buy. But flash, music, and video may well have a role within the site to illustrate particular sales features.

>>> More on Flash

Frames for the Homepage have a similar range of problems, restricting the space available for contents, may be difficult for search engines, difficult to print, often difficult for the user to go back a page, when other people display your website in a frame, you get the frames-within-frames problem.

>>> More on Frames

Animation has to be small and neat and used only where emphasis is essential. Used on logos, for example it distracts from the content. And content is what is important.

A surprising large number of people are disadvantaged in not being able to see small type, are colourblind, have difficulty moving the mouse, cannot hear music, troubled by flashing lights.

>>> More on Accessibility

What is your target audience is the question we keep asking.

I would like our websites to be an enjoyable experience for all visitors, but the objectives differ so widely. In the end the client gets what he asks for, and all we can do is warn him.

What we do have to discuss is what you are going to do with the inquiries you receive. How much business you plan to get from your investment.

There are two sides to this: you have to get the punters to contact you, by phone, mail or Email, and why should they do this. Whats In It For Me they ask. And then to get them to buy.

Then how shall you encourage them to come back for repeat sales and sales of associated products over the coming years; it is far easier to sell to someone who has already bought and enjoyed your product, rather than trying to grab new customers from an overcrowded marketplace. Buying a website is cheap and easy. Grabbing and keeping business is more difficult.

>>> More on Permission Marketing