Pi Development Blog

You’ve decided that you want a website, or you want to change your existing one that is outdated and not very effective. With that said, you need to lay out your plan so that you can express what you want, how you want it to work, and why. That way, your designer knowing what your vision is down to detail brings you closer to getting what you want. Here are some things you should lay out clearly and have written down:

For your designer: The more detailed and prepared you are, the more your designer can see your vision with you.

Goals: You don’t need to know the technicalities here. Just lay out what you want your website to do for you. Increase sales? Promote brand awareness? What is the goal you expect to achieve by investing in a new site?
Market: Who is your target? Who do you expect to visit your site, and who do you want to visit it more often?
Functionality: How you want your website to work. Describe how a client would come onto the site and find what they needed, navigation and details on your vision for the site.
Visual: What do you want your site to look like? Colors? Design? Do you have a logo or photos you want prominently displayed?

For you:

 These are prepared by you and are separate from web design services, but you must have them ready before your designer can start. You must buy your house before you can have someone remodel or work on the interior design. If you need help with anything or are unsure of how to go about getting these together, feel free to contact Pi Digital Media, they will go the extra step to make sure you are prepared in order bring about the best site-building experience.
Domain name: This means choosing a name for your website. It will the the online address where your business can be found. Make sure it is not already taken and registered by someone else and purchase it online.
Hosting: This is essentially where you pay rent online to have a space on the Internet. Once you have your domain, you can find a web host and purchase space to set up your site there.
Budget: Make sure you have a budget for the site you’re looking for. If you have questions about price ranges, ask your designer to lay out prices for you once you’ve told them everything you want and how you want your site to work.
Web designer: Make sure you have someone with the right capabilities to give you what you want. Make sure your designer feels confident about being able to listen to your needs and deliver. Choose someone you can trust and that won’t leave you disappointed with price, service, and the outcome of the site.

If your site was designed to incorporate a shopping cart and sell your products directly to your customers, there is one simple fact that you should know. Nothing is more important to converting visitors into customers than the layout of your product page. Sure if you’re Macy’s or Best Buy and offering a thousand items you might make the argument that the most important factor is the users ease of finding the right product, but if you’re like most of our clients chances are you are offering few than 100 products. And it’s just as likely that your business actually manufactures the product you plan to sell. With that said you have a much more detailed understanding of your offering so there is no excuse for an ineffective product page on your site.

We’ve been planning on covering this topic for a while but, like all great things on the internet, somebody else got to it first. Here’s a great article from Six Revisions about the Anatomy of an Effective Product Page Design.

When building a site it’s important that you can quickly convey the right message to a first time visitor. In an article we posted last year we described the first steps of organizing your web content, but I would like to take it a step further and describe how that content should be displayed.

As always, in order to have an effective website, you must have a solid understanding the goals of the website. Without clear goals, your business will not have any real purpose in developing a new site. Goals can vary from selling more products for e-commerce site, increasing traffic for an ad based site, or increasing the number of volunteers for a non-profit. A clear goal will set the tone and direction for how you expect visitors to use your site. One great way to organize your site is to start off with a wireframe. This provides an outline for what information goes where in order to accomplish the goals of the site.

Homepage
The landing page of your site should be a window into all of the important parts of your site. If you are a non-profit looking to increase membership and donations the landing page should have, at minimum, two distinct sections that address how to get involved and how/why people should donate. The homepage should be a compelling ‘sneak preview’ to everything your site has to offer.

Images vs Text
It is important to find an effective balance between the amount of text and the number of images on a page, especially the home page. Images convey emotion and the feel of your brand in many ways that text can not. Even a good writer may not be able to tell the story as well as an image because there is an emphasis on brevity in web copy. Text however does provide the specifics of your business that the users need to know.

Titles
The titles of each menu option should be clearly labeled. Resist the urge to create clever titles that are meaningless to the average user. Menus are to make navigation of the site easier, not more complicated. On the other hand, titles of a blog post can be as creative as you want, but you should use keywords in the titles so they are more likely to come up during search results.