Exploring the Dimensions

The following are the four guidelines needed to ensure a successful site. All four - brand, usability, content and design - must work as a team to create a site that's easy to use, strengthens your brand recognition, and increases the potential for leads and sales.

Brand

A strong brand makes you unique. It's the baseline for creating a customer expectation and experience that will result in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships between you and your customers. With your Web site being a primary point of contact, you must invest in building your brand on your site:

• Effectively use the Web to enhance and extend your brand.


• Express your brand value proposition quickly and efficiently through the appropriate use of images, text and rich media.


• Provide a compelling reason for users to enter your site, stick around, and want to build an ongoing relationship with your brand.

Usability

The interactions visitors experience on your Web site strongly influence their impression of your brand, which can affect the relationships they have with your company. To enhance usability when creating your site, it's important that you:

• Develop navigational elements that are logically structured, clearly labeled and easily accessible, creating a seamless and pleasurable user experience.


• Ensure site features and functions are intuitive to a user and worth the visitor's effort of using them.


• Test regularly to reduce an occurrence of errors and provide clear instructions to help users overcome obstacles.

Content

Content is key to presenting information that is relevant to users and to your brand. Ultimately, the amount of relevant content, or lack thereof, will make or break your site and your relationships with customers. However, there's much that can be done to develop effective site content:

• Categorize content in your site that makes sense to the user and promotes exploration of the key areas of the site.


• Develop functionality within your site to enrich the user's experience, providing for more personalized interactions.


• Ensure that your writing style and tone is appropriate for your target audience.

Design

Building a brand requires clear communication of key brand elements: benefits, emotional value, personality and essence. Communicating these brand elements online requires consistency.

From a bottom-line perspective, a consistent image builds brand familiarity. Familiarity builds relationships, and relationships build revenue. When developing your site, any steps you perform must focus on this principle:

• Employ professional, consistent visual communications techniques (color palette, typography treatments, attractive images, etc.).


• Establish a logical hierarchy and make sure the flow of information, the insertion of graphic elements, and the site messaging support this structure.


• Build your Web pages properly.

Writing text for your website is different from writing for print, and if you simply move your print documents onto Web pages, or write the same way you would for a printed brochure, you are not using the medium to its best advantage.

Why writing for the Web is very different from writing for print:

• 79% of users scan through the page instead of reading word-for-word.
• Reading from computer screens is 25% slower than from paper.
• As a general rule, web content should have 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent.

Here are some rules to follow when writing and organizing the text for your website:

• The Home Page is where people will ordinarily enter your site. It should ideally be made so someone can see in a few seconds exactly what the site is about and what services are offered without reading through a lot of text, going to another page, or waiting for Flash effects
  
• Your text needs to be short and to the point.
  
• The most important information should be at the top.
  
• Break the page up with descriptive headings.
  
• Use meaningful rather than "cute" headings (i.e., reading a heading should tell the user what the page or section is about)
  
• Use highlighting and emphasis to make important words catch the user's eye
  
• Bulleted and numbered lists are good for attracting and holding attention.
  
• Writing can be in a more casual, conversational manner than in print.
  
• The site should be organized with separate topics on separate pages, linked together with an easy to follow navigation system. Try to keep pages from being overly long.
  
• Users can enter a site at any page and move between pages as they chose, so make every page independent and explain its topic without assumptions about the previous page seen by the user.
  
• Long and detailed background information can be relegated to secondary pages; similarly, information of interest to a minority of readers can be made available through a link without penalizing those readers who don't want it.
  
• Most web visitors are impatient, and do not want to wait long for information to appear. Limit the use of graphics, particularly large-sized graphics and Flash presentations. The time it takes to load such images can frustrate many of your users.

These rules apply to text which you expect people to be reading online. There are sometimes exceptions to these rules. Some pages might contain material which you would expect people to print out for future reference. These can be done in more of a “print” style, and not optimized for online viewing as much as your other pages.

When you write the text for your website, we offer suggestions along the way. Another very important consideration when writing your text is optimizing for search engines, but that is a topic for other pages you will find here.

The first thing in planning a website is to think through exactly what you are trying to accomplish, who you are trying to reach, what content needs to be in it, and how to get viewers to the site. Whether you're planning a 3-page informational site or a 50-page e-commerce site, my planning guide can help you get started.

1. Define the main objectives of your site:

The main reasons for having a site usually include one or more of these:
____ Sales
____ Service
____ Information/Education

To offer company information
To increase public awareness of our company's name, brand or identity
To increase sales
To sell products directly over the Internet
To make product or service information available
To serve the needs of current and future clients
To explain our products and services
To encourage potential customers to contact us by phone, mail or e-mail
To bring in new clients or customers to our location
To compete in the global marketplace
To offer links to other relevant sites

• Define Your Audience:

Who do you want to reach? The site should be directed at them to meet their needs, and should give them an incentive to return.

• Pinpoint a Unique Concept:

Think about how you can compete with your competitors on the Internet. How is your company different; can you compete on price or service or the uniqueness of your product or ideas? Can you offer something your competitors aren’t? How can you make your site stand out from the rest?

• Research Similar Sites:

Surf the Web! Look at a variety of websites, especially of similar businesses. Make lists of the types of content, features, and design elements you like and don’t like. Save the URLs of the sites to give us as examples.

• Consider Site Features and Content:
  
  Think about what information and features you would like to have on your site and make a list. Here are a few possibilities:
• Contact Information - name, address, phone, fax, email, business hours
• Photos and/or graphics
• Summary of your products or services
• Product catalog
• Product manuals / guides
• Product sales information
• Product specifications
• Service manuals / guides
• FAQ's about you, your company, products and services
• Company brochure
• Personal Biographies
• Customer testimonials
• Portfolio
• Recent News or Special Offer area
• Visitor interactive forms, such as:
• search feature or database access to product information
• online purchase of products and services
• feedback form 
• guestbook
• discussion (or "chat") forum
• online newsletter, or newsletter sign-up
• content to download


• Create an outline of your site:

Now that you know and have listed the types of content you will want on your site, you need to figure out how you would like to organize it. Write an outline of what pages you will need, and what content will go on each page. As you think of all you would like to include, you might find there will be more pages than you originally thought.

Don’t put too much material or too many topics on one page if it can be helped. It is usually best to separate the topics and link everything together.

• Assemble your Site Content:

All text for your site should be provided in a computer ready format - either as a Microsoft Word document, *.doc, or text document, *.txt. Please format the text as closely as possible to how you would like it to appear on your website. These texts can be emailed to us as attachments.
If we have to type all the text onto the pages of your site the cost to create your site will be higher.

Graphics for your site should be in digital format. The most common are JPG, JPEG, GIF or PNG. These can be attached to an email and sent to Jolly Moon Designs , or we can provide a link where you can upload them to us on the Internet. If you have graphics that need to be scanned, we can do that if you can provide them to us. If you have a business logo we can use that on the site, or we might be able to create one for you.

• Consider your Marketing Strategy:

When Jolly Moon Designs creates your website we optimize it for the search engines, but much more should be done to bring viewers to the site. You need to get links to your website from other popular related websites . You need to coordinate your print media with your online site; put your website URL on your business cards, stationary, and any advertising you do. If you have information to offer, consider doing a newsletter.

• Decide on and Register a Domain Name:

If you don’t already have one, you’ll need to register a Domain Name. Jolly Moon Designs can do this for you if you wish. Choosing the right name is important for a number of reasons. It should be easy to remember, as short as possible, and somehow related to the content of your site.
It can be your company name, but doesn’t have to be. It gives you a slight advantage in the search engines to have a domain name containing your important keyword(s).
Here are a few guidelines about the different types:

• .COM - can be used for commercial and personal sites, the most popular worldwide
• .NET - recommended for companies involved in Internet infrastructure
• .ORG - recommended for not-for-profit organizations
• .US – recommended if it is important people know it is an American business
•  Use only letters, numbers, or hyphen ("-") 
• Cannot begin or end with a hyphen 

• Set a Target Date:

Decide when you would like to have the site up and running, and then set up a schedule for yourself to gather, create and provide the site content to Jolly Moon Designs . Then, allow enough time for the building of the website. We can give you a good idea of how much time will be needed when we know what will be involved in your project.