Once you’ve chosen your web design firm - Simply Creative Web Design, of course - then it’s time for some planning to make sure that your site is organized well from the beginning. Grab a pen and paper, and begin to make a list of the pages of information that you want on your web site. Some common one’s, depending of course on the type of site you are wanting, include: About Us, Services, Pricing, Examples, Frequently Asked Questions, Contact Us, etc… Since it’s your site, and you’re the expert when it comes to your business, you tell us what you want on your pages and we’ll shape it around you.

Once you’ve gotten a good listing, being to draw out a site map. Try doing something like this to organize your thoughts, just like you would when writing that big term paper in college.

This will help you to begin to see how people will navigate through your site. There are two common ways of doing navigation through web sites. Let’s explore…

1-Non-Linear Information Flow

This is what is mapped out above. Information flows in a non-linear way. People can pick and choose which links they click on and from there they can begin to gather more information based on what they want to know about. This is the most common way that sites are typically laid out on the internet today. When doing this, it’s important to make sure that you don’t bury any information too “deep” in your site. This happens when you put important information more than three clicks away from your homepage. This is a general design no-no. Make all your information accessible from the front page of your site within three link clicks or people will stop looking. This may mean that you need to make more main heading links on the front page in order to better divide up your content.

2-Linear Information Flow

In this navigation process, you direct the flow that users take to navigate your site. It allows you to walk them through a step by step process of information as you want them to read it. While this works well in directing your viewers, it can also cause people to give up easily and leave your site if they’re not able to immediately find the information that they’re looking for. If you choose to design your site navigation in this way, it is good to also provide alternative short cut links to specefic information on your homepage or in your footer links. This will help satisfy those ADD browsers (Like Me) who want information fast and readily accessible.

No matter how you decide you’d like your site navigation to flow, make sure that it’s simple for the user. We both know that there’s nothing more frustrating than a poorly navigated site. Keep your clients happy - make it easy to get the information needed from your site by making the navigation of your information flow simple!

If you don’t yet have a logo though, or are looking for a re-branding of your company and product, choosing a color scheme is important. There are some great sites out there to give you inspiration for color schemes. A few of our favorites are: Color Combinations and Colors on the Web. They both provide a lot of examples of color schemes that are complimentary and also provide the hexcode for web design coding. If you’re more of a hands on kind of person, try checking out the paint samples section in your local hardware store for inspiration. It’s a great way to see colors in person and you can always bring home the samples.

Colors provide a lot of information to viewers because they have so much emotion associated with them. For instance - Red gives a feeling of passion and power. Blue gives a feeling of peacefulness and stability. Black gives a feeling of power and elegance. Here’s a more comprehensive list of the associations that we have with colors - Color Meanings.

As you go through the planning process, take the time to think about your colors and what they say about you and your business!

However, in the adrenaline rush of “creativity” of their site design, web site owners typically forget that they are designing their site for one reason: their target audience. These people will likely find that flash movie irritating and that blinking text to be slightly obnoxious after viewing it multiple times. Even worse, your audience might not be able to find your site in the search engines because of these “necessary” bells and whistles. These are the attributes of a web site that can sometimes get in the way of important content and can confuse browsers and even drive away sales.

Here is the life cycle of web design that sites typically undergo:
• Stage 1 - Style is Everything!
• Stage 2 - Designing for Online Functionality
• Stage 3 - Designing for Them
• Stage 4 - Redesign Time
• Stage 5 - Conclusion

Stage 1- Style is Everything!
The first stage in web design is the part in which the owner typically really wants to be actively involved. It’s in this stage that people usually try to pack their sites with all of the newest online bells and whistles. Entire sites might be flash coding and video, or there may be some beautiful JavaScript mouse-over effects or drop-down menus in the design. It’s always a fancy design, but the message is clear — style is everything!

Stage 2 - Designing for Online Functionality
In Stage 2, the reality of an ineffective web design begins to be clear. This usually comes about three months after the initial launch. Often times these fancy design sites are rejected by many of the major directories and not indexed by the major search engines. In turn, they do not get the traffic or sales that were projected based on the various types of marketing strategies used.
Typically, this is when companies decide that they will try to hire a professional online marketer to promote the site. Splash page companies, in some way, shape or form, often rear their ugly heads in this stage. Unfortunately, many web sites fall into the trap of believing that a splash page is the answer to their online problems. Creating a simple homepage loaded with keywords which links directly to the existing web site will solve the issues of their online functionality. Companies go this route because the beautifully designed site couldn’t possibly be the problem with low site traffic and low functionality. The existing site is not ranking in search engines and the company cannot understand why they have no web presence when they have a web page floating out there in cyberspace. The simple truth is often this — they simply did not design and write an effective web site.

Stage 3 - Designing for Them
By Stage 3, after spending an outrageous amount of money on fancy web site designs and various marketing strategies, web site owners generally realize that they did not design an effective web site for the audience that they’re trying to reach. Often times this realization comes only after a great amount of lost potential profits and potential clients that are missed because of an inept site.

At this point, owners typically will bring in a third party web design expert to analyze potential problems and present various possible solutions. They’ll also often turn to search engine marketing experts to help make their site search-engine friendly so that their site ranks well naturally. If only they had known that if they did this in the early design phase, they could have saved themselves thousands of dollars in online marketing costs in promoting a defunct site.

Stage 4 – Redesign Time
After careful analysis from multiple outside sources, web site owners finally decide that scratching the old fancy site in order to launch a redesigned functional site is their only option to a successful web presence. A site that is planned, designed, and coded for user friendliness and search engine visibility generally gets the most traffic and resulting business because it was designed to do exactly that – be functional.

Conclusion
If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably found yourself in one of these stages of developing a web presence. Do yourself and your target audience a favor, and get the right information from the beginning to make your site simple, functional, and creative without throwing everything and the kitchen sink into your design. Your new clients, and more importantly, your bank account, will thank you.

Simply Creative Web Design specializes in designing simple, creative, and unique sites for our clients that are functional and user friendly. We also write our sites from scratch, ensuring that they are search engine friendly from the minute that they are published. If you find your company anywhere in the life cycle of web design, we can help!