More often than not, I see people putting the cart before the horse when designing their website. To determine the visual design of your website, you want to keep two key things top of mind.
What is the ultimate purpose of your website?
Are you selling a widget? Or, do you sell a high-end professional service? Or, rather than selling anything outright, do you simply want to present a polished and professional image? More than anything else, this is what gets missed most often in web design: The goal is not (merely) to look good; effective design is created to accomplish a goal.
Who is your audience and what do they expect?
What do you know about your audience, your prospective clients or customers? What are they looking for? What are their expectations? What do they want to see (perceive) when they come to your website? What will it take to really stand out from your competition?
It’s easy to become subjective about designing your business’s website. Yet it’s not about you. You must step out of your own shoes and into those of your prospective customers. They will make or break your business with their reactions and actions (or lack of actions) when visiting your site.
Once you have determined the site’s purpose and lined it up with an understanding of your clients, you are then ready to design. You can now make all design decisions with the goal of communicating that purpose to your prospective clients or customers.
To your success!
If I had eight hours to chop down a tree,
More often, I talk with lots of people who consider a website as an expensive prerequisite to doing business. So they do their best to keep the “expense” as low as possible.