Web Design Gloucester

Gloucester has an large number of professional web designers so finding a local supplier that exactly meets with your requirements should be easy. However, can I offer a word of warning, although there are may good web designers in Gloucester, there are plenty of bad ones! This site aims to give you, the customer, the knowledge to pick the good web designers from the bad.

If you don't have any experience of commissioning web sites then there is a good chance you may end up choosing an inexperienced and poor quality designer. These days anyone with reasonable IT skills can put together a web site and promote themselves as a web designer. If you're looking to invest in a web site to promote your business there is a lot to consider when designing and building a website, and if your designer is inexperienced then they could be throwing your money away!

Four steps to creating a successful web site

Step 1 - Understand your customer's needs
Now when I 'say understand your customers needs', I mean properly understand what they are looking for when they come to your web site. Don't assume you know what they want, ask them! A good way to get feedback from customers is to create a questionnaire so that you can gather meaningful and measured data. Offer some form of incentive to those that complete the questionnaire, if you ask the right questions the value of the data you get back will easily cover the cost of an attractive incentive. Use this data to design the content and navigational structure for the site.

Step 2 - Plan the marketing of your site
Unless you are offering free money then people are just not going to come flocking to your site. You need to consider how you will market your site in order that you get enough relevant traffic to generate a return on your web site investment. Don't expect that your web site will turn into a money-making machine over-night, be prepared for the long-haul, but if you dedicated and you plan well at the start, the success and revenue will come. If you have a limited budget for the development of your web site, make sure that you don't spend it all on attractive graphics and find you have little left to attract visitors, a beautifully designed site with good content is pointless if no-one is looking at it. Some marketing activities you should consider are:-

search engine optimisation
pay-per-click advertising
email marketing
networking events
get your domain name printed on all marketing communications

Step 3 - Make sure your site is easy to use
What really annoys me is web designers that think they need to create a completely new form of web site navigation and that their clients will really appreciate their original creativity. The reality of course is that visitors to the site get frustrated at being forced to learn how to use your site and access the content, and the result is they go elsewhere and have a bad impression of your business.

Did you know, $25 billion is lost every year due to web site usability issues! (source: Zona Research).

Recommendations to ensure your site is as easy to use as possible:

Test - all the tips in this list will help to achieve maximum usability, but at the end of the day, there is nothing better than getting together a group of people fitting your customer profile and filming how they interact with your website.
Consistent and logical navigation system - don't re-invent the wheel with you navigation, put it where people expect it to be and make sure it is easy to read. Plan the structure in advance, and make sure that the most popular information can be accessed with a couple of clicks.
Accessible web site - this is about designing a website to be accessible to all Internet users (both disabled and non-disabled). You may think that all your customers are able-bodied so building an accessible web site irrelevant to you, but think again. Accessible web sites not only only show you care and don't discriminate, but they are by their nature easier for all to use and easier for search engines to spider all of your content. Accessible web sites are likely to cost more to develop than non-accessible sites, but if you can't afford one, don't worry, non-accessible sites can still be easy for the majority of users, so don't let it stop you getting online, you can always make improvements later.

Step 4 - The right design
We all have personal preference for design and colour, but try to leave aside these preferences when you are considering the design of your site. Think about the brand values of your business and let the graphics and colours develop from this.

If you are a high-tec company, then technical graphics and colours such as blue, grey and black may be suitable. If you are friendly, customer service organisation, then pictures of happy people and warmer colours may work best. Above all avoid using Flash on your web site unless it adds some real value. This can be such a waste of money, and more often than not, it is just an irritation to your visitors.

If you have followed all the steps outlined above, and have succeeded in pulling potential customers to your web site, have created an easy to use site with good content, make sure that the image they see of your business does not put them off and waste all your hard work and investment.

Conclusion
If you follow the above steps then you will be well on the way to a successful web site. Assuming you are not a web developer and need to recruit professional help can I suggest you read our impartial guide on how to choose a web designer?

If you would like to talk to a Gloucester web designer that will be very happy to give you assistance in plain English, please contact Paul Benbow on 01452 780073.