How should your Site Look?

Web sites really are a matter of personal taste, but they should be designed with the intended audience in mind. A younger audience will be drawn to a “busy” site that contains lots of pictures and animation effects, but to a more mature audience, who maybe searching for information, such a site could prove frustrating to navigate. So, your first consideration must be the type of site visitor you are trying to attract. Secondly, you have to draw a distinction between a “Fun” site and an “Informative” site. It is possible to combine the two types successfully, but it takes a great deal of care and attention to get the balance just right. To illustrate the point, take a look at the screen shots below:

This is clean and simple design for a website selling children’s clothing. This version of the site shows many pictures of the store, and provides basic information about the products on offer.

However, this is a kids fashion store, so part of the web site marketing should be to make the site attractive to a younger generation. There really should be less emphasis on showing pictures of clothing racks in a store environment, and more emphasis on promoting a “Young at Heart” image.

Now take a look at the same web site with a younger theme.

This dramatic new look has loads of appeal to the younger generation. It contains links to the on-line store as well as special sections dealing with fun things to do.

The colour scheme is more vibrant and the pictures actually show happy kids.

This is the sort of site that a child may find, and subsequently show to their parents.

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So, when setting out on the “Grand Design” make sure you know who your intended audience is, and decide if a different audience can influence the main audience. This will help you set an overall theme for the site which you can accurately specify to your web designer.