It is really important to know about the personalities and preferences of your targeted visitors before you actually embark on designing or redesigning a website. There have been many a tomes when a professional web designer feels as helpless as being lost in a sea. Quite a considerable number of websites that are launched every year goes into oblivion pretty quickly causing their owners a significant amount of stress and monitory loss leaving them wondering why the site has felt to perform as expected.
The reality behind the fact is that we cannot put the blame upon a single factor and actually there are a number of things that have worked against it among that performance reducing factors poor titling, out of date promotional campaigns and detached or broken incoming links play a major role but being ignorant of your potential traffic or probable visitors is the greatest mistake that you can make while designing a website and there are so many sites who have failed to continue with their online existence only for this specific reason.
Fix the Compass!
For any professional web designer it is of at most importance that you make yourself absolutely sure about the kind of traffic that will probably visit your website and the whole process of incoming traffic analysis can go as deep as you want. If you are selling some products or services through your website then the first and most important thing that you are required to consider is that who are going to be your possible buyers and how much money do they earn or how much they are ready to spend in your site. Getting specific about this information and properly identifying your traffic depending upon the available demographic information can really help you to design your site in such a way that it is liked by your visitors.
Here are top five things that you will do better to consider before you actually start planning to design a website that will not only attract traffic but at the same will also make them come back to your site again and again.
Speculative Design: in one sense speculative design is that particular part of the design process when the basic design architecture is planned without depending upon any other factor except than the creativity of the design. This speculative design of a website can really work as a platform upon which the whole website can be developed when you start considering the other necessary details that involve your target audience as well as search engine optimization for your site.
End Users: Though the end users are the ultimate destination of any website designing process but it is always a better approach not to get obsessed by them from the very beginning of your designing process because that might lead your website to be completely utilitarian and the aesthetic appeal of it can very well be missed. But as a successful web designer you must find a way to balance the two so that the website you design is both aesthetically beautiful and useful at the same time so that it can really enjoy a steady flow of traffic and visitors.
Keyword research: Keywords have always been one of the most important factors for search engine optimizers as well as web designers that are responsible for diverting as much traffic as possible to your website and also to make it rank among the top sited in any popular search engine result. Availing a top position in search engine result pages can really contribute to improve your traffic and though there are many latest search engine optimization strategies that can improve your site’s online visibility but there is little in the importance of the keywords and as an experienced website designer who can assure his clients a steady flow of traffic over a particular period of time you must know which keywords you are going to use and where because most of the time finding the right keywords is enough and you must use them in proper places too so that the search engine spiders can easily crawl through your site and provide it a ranking depending upon its content, popularity and relevancy.
Home page design: Most of the traffic that visit any particular website land directly on your homepage from the search engine results or also from the inbound links or back links that you will generate to ensure maximum traffic to your website and that is the reason why the importance of a perfect design for the home page can never be denied. Moreover there is an added problem that majorities of the traffic that visit any website do not go beyond the homepage and that is a very serious problem that a designer must consider while designing the homepage for a particular site. That is why minimizing the number of clicks required to be made by the visitors to reach the content is extremely important and has forced many web designer to put as much content on the home page as possible.
Optimized design: While designing a website you must remember the fact that designing a search engine friendly website is more important than designing aesthetically beautiful websites and to make sure that your design elements must readily allow himself for search engine optimization because by far that is the most reliable way to divert maximum traffic to your website.
Google is by far the most popular search engine dominating the world of the internet and as a professional and efficient web designer you must have prior knowledge about the preferences of Google and design your site depending upon those preferences so that during the later period of promoting the website the search engine optimization professional do not face any design related problem and the site that you have designed can really achieve its commercial goal.
Tips and Warnings:
By far the best practice of designing a website is to start with relatively simple things and then find a systematic way to gradually improve upon them. Many a times the initial layout might not look attractive but under no circumstances you should rush through the process and also make sure that the load time of your website is always as low as possible because sites that take a long time to load are traditionally found to have less visitors and use as much modern technology as possible to keep your site light and quick to load. As a professional web designers catering to your clients it is really important that you must never violet the trust of your visitors never heart the credibility of the site that you have designed by annoying pop ups and irrelevant advertisements that will make your visitors to leave your site as quickly as they can and never to return again. Also attach a clear and concise privacy statement to your website and also never forget to provide a legitimate contact information so that you can generate a feeling of dependency in the mind of your visitors and if you really need advertisements in your site then express the reason to your visitors as that will help you to gain their confidence and they will also start to believe upon your credibility.