The next most important thing you need to know about website design

Last time around we pointed you in the direction of a website that shows how many of them there are in the world – and the growth is truly staggering!  If you remember, the figure is now well over 1 billion!

We also suggested two brief experiments:

1.  Just for an experiment, for a given time period (say, one day), quickly list how many different websites you visit, for what purpose, and how “good” the sites were.  By “good” we’re not talking about any scientific objective measure, just how closely the site matched what you were looking for, perhaps on a scale of zero to five.  This is just for fun, but the reason will become apparent later on!
2. For another fun experiment, examine all the sites you’ve bookmarked and categorise them in any way you want.

We’re not sure how many of you will have actually carried out these two fun “experiments”, but we hope you see what we were getting at … if the immediate impression that the sites made on you was sufficiently “good” then you’ll have probably stayed on them for a while, hopefully found what you were looking for, and maybe even bookmarked it to find it easily again later.

Remember the most important 2 things that you need to know about website design?

1. You only get one chance to make a first impression
2. If you remember nothing else, remember that!

We’re now moving on to the next most important thing, which is …

There’s lots more to think about!

Great news – they’ve found you, and you’ve captured their attention, albeit momentarily.  So you now have a very short amount of additional time to really get their interest.  To study the content, check additional pages, follow links, bookmark the site, ideally even buy something (or at least use the ‘Contact us’ feature, or perhaps put in a phone call).

But how do you achieve this, we hear you ask?  It’s all to do with website design, and this is exactly what we’ll be covering in this series of articles.

We’ll be looking at:

•  how to make a brilliant first impression
• the importance of high quality “content”
• site navigation
• the use of links (internal and external)
• making it easy to do business

for starters.  And, as promised, once we’ve covered website design from the user’s perspective, we’ll take a look at it from the designer’s point of view.

 What if you can’t wait another month?

 Well, if you really can’t wait then why not click here for our home page, here for our contact page, or give us a call on 020 7199 8713 and we’ll let you into some of our secrets!