Basic Principles of Web Design (Designing Websites That Look Like a Million Bucks)
You must think of your website as the hub of your online business. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, think of your website as the reflection of your store in cyberspace (much like Plato’s world of ideas, by the way), this is all the customer knows about you. And, first impressions lasting as they are, you will not want a shabby representation of your business on cyberspace.
Before anything gets in the way, let us mention beforehand that a website is meant to be browsed by human users – and good web design should never forget this fact. A well-planned and well-executed design could even generate additional streams of income, using valuable screen real estate and turning these into compartments that sell different products or services. But we are getting ahead.
Web design is first and foremost for human users; it is meant to attract visitors and get customers. Just like a brick-and-mortar store, the layout should be comfortable for visitors, and there should be facilities for users’ ease of use. A web design agency builds their company around this principle; and good designers build a design portfolio along this same line.
But a successful website design must not only attract the eyes of human visitors; they must also look appealing to search engine robots (or crawlers, which scan a webpage to determine its relevance and importance). Website layout also considers things such as the site architecture, which is what a webpage looks like to a crawler.
Other things that are worth considering in design services are:
First, users’ visual abilities may vary greatly, Web pages should also be optimized for ease of access
Second, users connect to the Internet at various connection speeds, so a website builder must not use very large pages (containing large graphics content, for example) in order to make browsing easier for slower connections
We mentioned above that good design can even generate additional income streams for a website. These could be in the form of ‘leasing’ screen real estate for advertising, encouraging a user to subscribe to a list or service, etc.
A good design and development strategy is to incorporate these principles in a single layout. While the priority is to design for human browsers, care must also be practiced to make the page more friendly to search engines.
To get local quotes, contact a web design company in Singapore. Fees generally vary according to the number of pages to build, and the content (such Flash, audiovisual elements) that the page will have. At any rate, good web design must be made mainly to convert onlookers into actual buyers – so that should be enough to offset the costs.