Design is vital to your marketing efforts!

Aside from having the most amazing products and services, the marketing of your company is absolutely vital, the overall design of your website and other marketing materials will lead you to a successful business. Just as people ignore stores that look dull and unattractive, people will also pay no attention to your poorly designed website, brochures, flyers and business cards.

Design plays a vital role in attracting customers. If you aim to compel people to buy your products, you should tickle their visual appetite. Graphic design, for example, can turn simple information about a product into a convincing message, which attracts potential buyers. This is done by combining the power of text, images, colours and layout.

Here are some of the benefits you can get from a good marketing design.

1. It can communicate your message well. Graphic design conveys a message faster and more efficiently than text alone. To improve your sales, you will need to focus, not only on the quality of your products and services (although this is equally important), but also to the design strategy you use to sell them. Let’s face it, even if you offer the best possible product in the market, other companies will still get ahead of you in terms of sales because they have a more effective design to market their products.

2. It gives you a good name. Your website (or any other marketing tool) represents not only your business but more importantly it represents you as well. A well-designed website will assure clients that they are dealing with a good company. Build a good reputation by first gaining their trust through a good design. Remember that in business, first impressions are of utmost importance.

3. It helps improve your marketing strategy. Your marketing plan should be devised together with the design of your marketing tools (brochures, flyers, website, corporate identity and so forth). Graphic design is intended to help you promote your products and services. So to yield the best result, you must work well with your hired designer.

Your business deserves more than a dull and ineffective marketing strategy. Ensure that your business looks and feels professional in all media (print and online), not just when a client enters your offices.

Necessary elements of a great web site

1. WELL ORGANISED HOME PAGE
You have probably seen Web sites with so much information jammed packed on the home page that it makes it impossible to know where to start. Having a well organised home page means making it easy for visitors to find information and having a clear plan on where you want your visitor to go. Unnecessary icons and buttons are distractions. Keep it simple for your visitors and they will not only stick around, but they will come back.

2. MINIMAL ANIMATION
Excessive animation may have been cool 5 years ago, but it is now considered annoying. Animation is okay in moderation, however, as long as the maximum loop is 5 times or less. You can effectively use animation to draw attention without distracting the visitor from the purpose of your Web site.

3. READABLE BACKGROUNDS
Have you ever visited a Web site that looks good until the background image loads and now you cannot read the text? The beach, the sky, your cat may all be very important to you, just do not use them as your background. Solid backgrounds without patterns that offset the color of the text work best.

4. CONSISTENT TEXT
You may use different fonts besides Arial, Verdana, and Times New Roman, but do not go overboard. Stick to one font for your text. Fonts like Arial or Verdana are easy to read. Remember that if you use an uncommon font for your text, your visitor must have that font loaded on their system in order to view it properly. You can create graphics with uncommon fonts, but graphics can slow the load time of your Web page and are not indexed by search engines without added HTML code which can hurt your search engine rankings.

5. NO UNDER CONSTRUCTION SIGNS
As detailed in our last newsletter, A Web Site is a Constant Work in Progress - http://www.bannerview.com/newsletter/archive/?id=127 - no site is a finished product. Most are continually being updated with new information. In a sense, every Web site is always “under construction.” However, that message should never appear on your home page because you’re essentially telling visitors that your site is not ready for them to view. Search engines like Yahoo! will automatically reject your site if you have ANY page that states it is under construction.

6. DON’T SPECIFY WHICH WEB BROWSER TO USE
Few statements on a Web page annoy visitors as much as “This Site Best Viewed With...” How many times have you ever upgraded or downloaded a new Web browser just to look at a single Web site? Probably never. Unless you are absolutely certain that visitors will use a particular Web browser (on a company Intranet, for example), your site should be optimized to display effectively across major browsers.

7. NO BACKGROUND MUSIC
Background music on a page adds no content but increases the annoyance factor and the page download time. It is ok to include music clips on your site, but give your visitors the option to listen instead of assaulting them with your choice of music. Since most people surf the Internet at work or have music already playing on their computer, adding to that really detracts from their experience.

8. CONSTRUCTION AROUND MOST POPULAR SCREEN RESOLUTIONS
A lot of Web designers will design their site around a certain resolution - their own computer’s! The problem is that not everyone will have a 21” monitor and a resolution of 1024x768. This makes it so visitors have to scroll if they aren’t using a high resolution. Using expandable tables that contract and retract with different resolutions and designing to the most popular resolution of 800x600 is a good way to ensure that your site is viewed correctly by the majority of its visitors.

9. USE WEB COLOR COMBINATIONS
The Web Palette consists of 216 colors that both Macintosh and Windows systems display accurately. A lot of graphics are “too large” meaning they have “unused” colors in them which cause the graphics to be larger (in file size) than they need to be. By taking out these unused colors, it will make your graphics load faster, sometimes by as much as 30%.

10. OVERALL CONSISTENCY
The layout and design of your site from page to page should remain consistent. Keep the color scheme, sight lines, navigation buttons and text links in the same places from page to page. This will give the visitor a better experience as they will come to expect certain aspects of the site appearing in the same places and anticipate their navigation throughout the site.