Joined up thinking 

The web is now a standard part of everyday life for consumers. For a large majority of people it is their first choice of media to find a product or a service. Can the casual web surfer find your site and locate the information they want, or are you losing sales because you are making life difficult for people?

Defining your audience is a key step in making sure your website delivers the right content in the right way. Whatever the aim of your website it has to speak to your audience in a language that they understand. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What are they looking for? What are the key messages that will convince them engage with you?

Using industry jargon or confusing functionality will quickly alienate people from your site and a confused customer is very unlikely to have a positive online experience with you.

Once you have defined your target audience, what next? The next stage is defining what that audience is looking for. If someone arrives on your site what is the first question they will ask? How can you provide them with clear and simple directions to enable them to find what they are looking for?

Getting to know the aims of your audience and providing clean and efficient ways for them to discover the correct content is a key ingredient to all good websites. This discipline is often called Web usability, or User Experience journeys. You can read more about how we approach architecting User Experiences here.

People are often very quick to jump into website design and graphics, but before you do that take a step back and think about what you want your website to actually do for you. What are the business goals for your site? Do you have a site for brand awareness or is it transactional?

What your site has to accomplish for you can have a huge impact on the design and layout of it. Plan what it will do first and only then start looking at more granular issues like the colour scheme.