|
Home / Internet / Web Design
Structural Business Web Design
By:David Malan
When it comes to web design for your business website, what picture do you conjure up in your mind? Talented artistic people working hard to create a visual masterpiece, using sophisticated graphic design software? Well, you're not entirely wrong, only about 99% off.
Most people think of "web design" as almost a synonym for "graphic design". This is really a very unfortunate association, mainly because it lowers your expectations, and grossly understates what you should expect from your business website. Now consider the expression "structural design". Conjures up a completely different perspective, doesn't it? The fact of the matter is that you need a structural designer for your online business presence far more than you need a pretty face for it, in the same way that you need an architect and structural engineer to design your business office, and a business manager to build your business, far more than you need a painter to make it look good, or an advertising business to help create a positive public perception.
Every aspect of your business is important in some way or other, it's just that some aspects are more important. The problem of course is that you would never build your business premises from cardboard and then just paint it nicely so that it looks great from the front. Of course, the first customer that walked in would balk at the lack of depth of your business, and walk very quickly back out again.
It is exactly the same when building your online business presence. Absolutely, your business website should look great. After all, if it is not attractive and professional, people are going to be just as wary of dealing with you. That said, your website needs robust and solid structural design if you want potential customers to come in, look around, pick up and test your merchandise, have a cup of coffee, chat to your salesman, and make an informed and satisfactory purchase.
The days of an online brochure with a nice contact form and slick design doing the job for you are long gone. For someone to buy your business, they want to query your product database for the perfect product option. They want to search your store for relevant advice and product information, chat to other people in the market and interact with you as the business proprietor. If opening the door makes your business premises fall down, that's as far as anybody will get.
So what does that mean when selecting a "web designer"? Simply, it means don't look at how pretty their work is as 100% of your decision criteria -- you are not looking for a graphic designer. These are some of the things a "web structural designer" should be able to bring to an effective online business:
* A solid foundation -- your business website should at a minimum include an easy-to-use content management system and database.
* User registration and management facilities -- if you don't know who your customers are, you cannot communicate regularly with them
* Product database -- this is your storeroom, without which you simply have nice pictures on a cardboard cutout as your product display.
* E-commerce capabilities -- your customers should be able to buy from you online as easily as they can offline, otherwise they may as well visit a store close to them.
* Customer communication tools -- newsletter functionality, online surveys and feedback forms are all effective and important ways of making the one-way internet medium into a two-way communication environment.
* Automated online promotion capabilities -- this is a newer feature that most probably would not think of. The tasks associated with submitting your pages to search engines, optimizing your urls to be search-engine friendly, and many other SEO tweaks are increasingly time-consuming aspects of keeping business websites up to date. Many of these tasks, such as Google Sitemaps submission, url creation based on the title and content of the page, and relevant meta tag generation, to name a few, can all be automated into the design of your website's core programming. Including them up front will save you countless hours and money trying to accomplish these tasks manually.
At the end of the day, your business website should look good. Much more importantly, it should be the most structurally sound and efficient aspect of your business if you make full use of it's potential. Make sure your designer is coming from a systems engineering and programming design perspective, not just a graphic design paradigm, and you'll have a business website that not only looks good, but also works tirelessly as hard as you do.
Digg
del.icio.us
Blink
Stumble
Spurl
Reddit
Netscape
Furl
Article keywords: web design, ecommerce, e-commerce, internet, web site design, online business, internet marketing, web marketing
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com
David Malan is an internet and e-commerce expert with over ten years experience in designing and developing enterprise grade online solutions for business.
He owns and runs RealmSurfer Consulting, based in Perth, Western Australia.
Website: Web Design Perth
About: About RealmSurfer Web Design Perth
|
|
| Top Web Design Articles |
- 1). Advanced Joomla Templating (pt1) Using Module Class Suffix By : Robert Palmer
an article from User Written Resources
1. duplicate the styles already used for the particular module, adding a suffix to each style name. this will definitely include some of the following;
1. .module {} 2. div.moduletable {} 3. div.moduletable h3 {} 4. table.moduletable {}/li> 5. table.moduletable th 6. table.moduletable td
and can include other styles used on the content in that section, such as;
1.
|
- 2). Irish Graphic Design Industry By : dave4
Graphic design is the use of color, light, balance, contrast, emphasis, proportion, proximity, repetition, texture and a plethora of other elements to create a work of digital art that is pleasing to the eye. Graphic design is about seamlessly molding image and text to convey a theme, message, or often advertise a product or service. Graphic design dates back to prehistoric times.
|
- 3). Adsense: The Smart Investment By : Pat Lovell & Jon Atwood
Over the last 2 years, We have been building a Virtual Adsense Empire of over 500 websites and making some good money. We've also been building content sites for clients using the same system. The system we use is not something that produces 1000's of sites with a click of a button, our system does not build spam websites, nor does it produce the same sites you see over and over and over again.
|
- 4). Some guidelines for Website Design By : Angela Oliver
You have a great product. You also have a great company image and marketing model. Now it is time to implement all your plans and bring together a website. You know very little about websites. Finding websites that have failed is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. Many people come into the internet business with the notion that if they are on the web, they are guaranteed to make money.
|
|
|
- 6). Develop Your Business Web Site for Profits By : Jay Peterson
Looking into developing your business web site? Whether creating a business web site to sell your business products online or just to give the public valuable information, creating a business web site can be an important first step to creating an important presence on the web. Here are some tips on creating a business web site as well as what is involved in getting your business web site off the ground.
|
- 7). Is your printing costs sky rocketing? By : Florie Lyn Masarate
Here are some things you can do to be able to lower your printing costs.
1. Cheap but good quality printer.
There was a time when only a handful of people can afford having one of those colored and digital printers. Now that these things are more rampant, they have become more affordable. Color printers of good quality are even inexpensive already.
|
- 8). Creating A Quality Web Site Design! By : Martin Lemieux
In this article, I will attempt to cover the basics of creating a great quality web design template for your site. Now it's a known fact that the layout or "eye candy" as I put it will determine whether your visitors will stay more than 15 seconds or they will just become another statistic.
In this article, I will attempt to cover the basics of creating a great quality web design template for your site.
|
- 9). How Does Your Website Make Me Feel? By : Philippa Gamse
When people think about the Internet, they think about technology. When people hear that I am a Website strategy expert, they see me as a "techy type".
But for me, the most intriguing aspect of your online business isn't about the technology. It's about human connections, and how you can create these in a virtual environment.
It's commonly understood that "people buy emotionally, not intellectually.
|
- 10). For Automated Sites - PHP and MySQL Are A Perfect Match By : Halstatt Pires
You’ve decided to automate your web site. Now what? Here are some ideas to help you choose how to automate your site.
A bit of programming is going to be necessary if you want to automate a site. There are many types of programs that can be used to automate a web site including JavaScript, PHP, Perl, ASP, Java and more. So, which do you use? For many, it is a personal choice.
|
| New Web Design Articles |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
- 7). Graphic Artists - Who Needs One When You Can Do It Yourself Online? By : Pearl Deloria
Image is everything! Think about it. How many times have you made a judgment about a company based on the quality of the junk mail that you have been sent?
Other people make similar judgements, too. Businesses cannot afford to be thought of as cheapskate in their marketing.
You know that most of your mail goes straight in the trash, and it may grieve you to spend four times the amount, just for it to be thrown away.
|
- 8). How To Style Your Text With CSS By : Hilco van der Meer
Styling text with CSS is really simple. We can define colors, underline it, make it bold, define the font etc etc.
We will start with some basics.
First we define the html where we will be working with. This is the text
1. Colorize your text
We can select the P tag and add some styles to it.
p { color:red;
}
Now our text will turn red. You can define any color code your want or choose one of the 16 standard color names.
|
- 9). What is a web designer anyway? By : Alicia Harper
As a web designer, I get all kinds of requests , for information other than web design, and as a web designer I'm not suppose to really to be able to do things outside of the web design area. I believe there are a few misconceptions about what exactly a web designer does. In this article I am going to nail down exactly what a web designer is and what they should be able to do.
|
- 10). Advanced Joomla Templating (pt1) Using Module Class Suffix By : Robert Palmer
an article from User Written Resources
1. duplicate the styles already used for the particular module, adding a suffix to each style name. this will definitely include some of the following;
1. .module {} 2. div.moduletable {} 3. div.moduletable h3 {} 4. table.moduletable {}/li> 5. table.moduletable th 6. table.moduletable td
and can include other styles used on the content in that section, such as;
1.
|
|
|
