Crafting the Perfect Web Environment
What makes a perfect web environment? It is more than just a great look. It must have the right look for the purposes it is designed to fulfill. To design the perfect web environment, a designer needs to focus on the purpose of the site as well as on making it look nice. The skills that a designer gains with experience will help the designer make good looking sites, but it is the focus on the purpose of the site that will help the designer home in on the right look for that particular web environment.
How to Select a Style that Fits
To choose the right design for the site, you need to know the product first. If you don’t know what is being presented on the site, you are flying blind. The more you can learn about the product, the better off you will be. Choosing the right design for a web environment is like choosing the right pair of shoes to sell to a customer. In order to make the sell, the shoes you are offering to the customer must fit that particular customer. In order to find the right fit, you need to know the size of the customer’s foot, taking into account additional variables such as width, height, and shape. But just finding a shoe that fits the foot isn’t enough. You also need to find a shoe that that particular customer wants, and that depends on the customer’s tastes (not yours!) and on what the customer is planning to use the shoes for. A customer looking for running shoes isn’t going to select a pair of dress shoes, no matter how nice they look.
This is why a nice looking style is not enough for a website to be successful. Crafting the perfect web environment requires the site to be tailored to its purposes, and those depend on the individual product and target customers. As you work on your design, keep in mind the following two guiding principles. First, tailor the site to the customer. To do this, you will need to know as much as you can about who will be using the site, including how old they are, what percentage are male or female, what kinds of interests they can be expected to have, etc. The second important principle is to tailor the site to the product itself. Pay attention to the style used in the product design and its marketing. Look for what makes it stand out from other products. What kinds of activities and in what environments will the product be used. All of these things can be helpful in selecting the right design for the site.
Putting Ideas into Action
After learning about the product and the target demographic, a designer can begin to put it all together and design with this knowledge in mind. Knowing what appeals to the targeted site visitors will guide the look and feel of the site. The attributes of the product itself should likewise be incorporated. For flashy products, the web environment should be flashy. For elegant products, the site should be elegant. Mismatching the web environment and the product can turn away customers who would otherwise be very satisfied with the product. The perfect web environment will appeal to the user in just the same way that the product will. Crafting the website with this focus allows designers to target the right group in the right way.
Design with Flexibility in Mind
Every website needs to be changed sooner or later. Just like fashions, the style of a site today may not carry the same appeal tomorrow. The target audience may change over time, and even the product itself may undergo significant revisions. For all of these reasons, web designers need to craft their web environments to be flexible.
One common pitfall is for designers to become attached to particular ideas or designs and become unwilling to change them. In the face of change, this can cause a perfect web environment to degrade into an ineffective one. Regardless of the designer’s personal preferences, the effectiveness of the site needs to remain the top priority. On the one hand, this means that the designer will need to continue to devote time to the project, but the benefit is a web environment that stays perfect even when circumstances change.
Danny Holley is a web design Utah expert and writer. He is also a partner and lead designer at the Utah web design firm, Superior Design Inc.