Website Design Basics: Objective Driven Design

The number of personal homepages in the Web today that boast general information about the webmaster (like his name, age, and place of origin) and some other uninteresting information (like say, a picture of his pet dog) is an overwhelming joke. Their website design is usually plain and ineffective at best. The websites don’t have objectives, their design is simply to exist, nothing more. If you plan to build a website that actually needs to do something other than sit there, then you need to set your objectives.

The objectives of your website then dictate or at least influence your website design. Keeping the core quality concepts in mind—keeping it simple, unique, and strong, without being too overwhelming—you then determine other aspects of the website’s design. Should its mood be informal or professional? A personal site hosting blogs can settle for an informal ambiance while an internet marketing site would be better off with a professional feel. What fonts will be used and how will they be structured? Sans and sans serif font types—as well as other font families—have different effects that you can even combine to get a positive result. How will your visitors navigate through your website? Usually navigational tools are set to one side or corner of a webpage to make it easier for the visitors (they don’t have to make wide mouse movements to get to different navigational tools), but this too can be affected by your site’s objectives.

After the website design concerning aesthetics and structure comes planning the actual content or the articles in the website. For the site to be in any way successful, some content optimization needs to be done. This may get a bit technical like tweaking word repetitions and copy editing or proofreading articles, but all the same, all of this needs to be done in line with the website’s objectives.