Building a Useful Website for Bloggers or Retailers As a website designer, your role is more than just to put information on a site. It also extends beyond the realm of making the page look pretty. There are too many websites out there that focus on information or the design. The reality is, a web designer needs to use the two together to push people to the content that matters.
How to Effectively Design a Blogger Site Your design should do things that reflect the purpose of the site. For an opinion blog, you want to create an interface that encourages people to check out multiple blog posts. You can do that by programming the site to include hyperlinks to similar blog posts near the end of a post, or even within it. Or you can make them appear in an attractive way in the side bar to prompt a reader to check out one of the other popular posts from the site. The reader should be able to find interesting or relevant information easily. If they have to do anything more than point-and-click or search, then they’re going to lose interest quickly. Granted, the content is going to be the most important part to capture the reader’s attention. That content is usually the sole responsibility of the author, but your design can go miles into making that text look more attractive.
Online Stores For an online store, your website design needs to display what the consumer is looking for. The front page needs to display a sampling of every type of item the store sells. Providing categories to choose from will display the store’s wide selection and hook the customer into the site, if those are the products they are looking for. Your job will be to put the most popular categories first and above the fold. The products need to be pleasant to look at and the customer needs an intuitive interface to click through to see the things they want to. They should be able to drill into the site easily. Although you want them to stay on a product page and purchase it, it’s also important to offer them a simple way to get back to the general categories to continue shopping. No one wants to feel trapped on a site. Keep a list of categories on the far left column of the page. Check out how other retail sites are set up and imitate their structure.
This is the structure that people have become accustomed to and it will make the process so much easier for them. Look to Amazon.com as a great example.
Quality of Content As with the blog site, the last word of how many conversions a company gets will come down to the quality of their products. If they don’t want the product, they’re not going to buy it, and there’s nothing more you can do to change that. You should still give the retailer your best work so that when the right person does come along, they easily find what they’re looking for. People bounce off sites all the time because either (a) it’s not the site they were looking for, or (b) it is the site they were looking for and they didn’t find it immediately. The first reason for bouncing is unavoidable in a lot of cases. The second reason should never happen, and a lot of that responsibility falls on you. Stevens Henager can teach you more about web design and development in St. George. Stevens Henager offers the opportunity to start a new career. They offer courses in web design and development around the country. Locals to St. George have access to their services, but look to see if there’s a branch nearby that can help out.