Website Designing - Looks vs. Works

Web developers with extensive graphic arts background often pay more attention to how a page looks than considering how visitors are going to find the page. The consideration on Usability and Business gets sidelined. On the other side of this issue, SEO consultants obsess about how much traffic it generates and how well a web site works. Sales and Business gets a front seat for them.

Designers want more 'pretty' graphics, but SEOs want lots of 'ugly' keyword-rich text, bullet lists, and text links. The more graphically complex the website the longer it will take to load.

To balance those Looks vs. Works, currently a web design company is in demand, which have an advanced knowledge on marketing, designing, programming as well as aesthetics. Designers having absolute control over the size and dimensions of all aspects with an eye on marketing are pitching to success. Today, fixed browser-friendly designs are more frequently chosen over the liquid designs.

There is a usability reason for why a designer may choose a more fixed layout. There is usually an optimal line width in terms of readability. There is a rule which tells that lines should be between 40-60 characters long, or approximately 11 words per line, though users can choose their windows size and font selection to optimize the factors which are important to them.

It becomes difficult sometimes to create a fixed layout which looks well and sells. Well, if the content is agreed upon, there is always a little difficulty in developing.

Storyboarding
To maintain an adorable balance between LOOKS and WORKS, the modern web gurus emphasize on storyboarding. Storyboarding covers the business, audience, purpose and the content. So the web designing is going to be more and more of calculative engineering than liberal art.

Storyboarding records description, purpose and title of each page in a given website. Then those elements are linked together according to the most effective and logical diagram patterns. It is like a prototype where there are options for feature enhancements and future improvements.

Audience Research
The key step in web designing/planning is defining the audience. They are the group of people who will visit your website – the market being targeted. Those people have a certain reason for visiting your site. And it is important for you to know what they are looking for. Technology and Eye-Candy designs come much later.

A clearly defined goal of the site and an understanding of what visitors want to do when they come to your site helps to pitch your message to identify the target audience. Upon considering who is most likely to use the content. There are some common factors a webmaster should take care.

They are:

Audience Characteristics - Age, Language, Education
Information Preferences - Techies, Naive
Computer Skills - Beginners, Masters
Web Experience - Web builders, Web surfers, Lay-users

Kathy John is an eminent analyst and writer in internet marketing related topics like web design firm, search engine optimization and web hosting.