SITE DESIGN

Usability
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Design sets the tone of a site.
The structure, the layout and how information is presented are important considerations. We are usability experts.

The designer who emphasizes that your site be “unique;” who seeks to use images to “evoke emotion;” who wants your pages to be “open and fresh” is not right for a business that lives or dies by online leads and sales.

The designer who talks about “drawing the eye to offers;” who wants to leverage “prime screen real estate;” and for whom landing pages are not an after thought is a keeper.

CALL KAREN ELLIS THE EXPERT YOU CAN TRUST 1.276.633.0388

• Design with the user in mind
  How will visitors use your web site?
  Why are visitors coming to your site?
  What do you want them to learn or buy from your site?
  Surf the World Wide Web to see what you like and what your competitors are doing.
• Fundamentals of Good Design
  Beautiful, eye-popping design and effective, profitable web design are two different things. And it always seems easier to mistake those eye-popping designs for profitable ones. Don't spend more on design than on Conversion Rate Optimization
  Be clear
  Be consistent
  Be easy to navigate
  Be easy to read

Client's Opinions

A Client can ruin perfectly good site designs by insisting on adding content that looks like it's from someone who first discovered fonts, styles, sizes, bolding, colors, you name it. There is no way offer a tactful way of telling them to STOP.

• Example: Using Cats as Fonts
• Social Media Cheat Sheets
• Look at Style Guides: a consistent typographic treatment is clearer and strengthens the brand's message. Using Comic Sans
• Some people's tastes and opinions see nothing wrong with { Super Bad Sites } but clients have a right to their opinion.
• As a designer, we are engaged not only in providing a design, but also in providing expertise in how to maintain that design.
• If you were to hire someone to pick out cool clothes for you, then you would expect their expertise in the choices they picked out to make to make you look good and you would also take their advice on how not to ruin the choices they made for you.
• There's a series of commercials out now that say "You wouldn't want your doctor doing your job, so why are you doing his/hers? Only a doctor can tell if it's ..." This is a similar situation.

Creating a mobile-friendly version of a company site

You need to ask: "What do people using our site on a mobile device want to do?"

More often than not (especially for a B2B site) the answer will not be different than what they want to do on a desktop. So why offer a limited menu when people want the full menu? I feel that few things are more frustrating that going to a company's site on my phone, getting a mobile site, not finding what I want, and then trying to navigate the full site in that tiny space. If I'm going to have to navigate a full site on my mobile device, don't make me have to through an intermediate step.

On the other hand, if the answer is that there are some very key things users want while away from their desktops, then a mobile site will take your far. Have you asked your users? If not, that is the first step. Find out what 5 things they want to do specifically on mobile devices. Then build the site around them.

In my opinion, in cases where there is not a compelling need for a mobile site, money and resources would be better spent on usability testing (and fixing problems that are found) or content strategy (and making changes accordingly), or waiting a little longer until responsive design can be implemented. You don't have to redo a design for it to be responsive, but the site does have to be thought through in a new way and recoded accordingly.