Look and Feel

The look and feel of your site depends on:

• Site Purpose
• Site Content
• Existing Corporate Image / Colours / Logos
• Target Audience

Most companies have there own ideas about how to make their site 'interesting'. They want flashy animations and heavy impact colours to bring their site to life. Unfortunatley people browsing company websites only want to know two things 'Do they provide what I am looking for?' and 'Is this a company I want to do business with?'

'Do they provide what I am looking for?'
This is where site navigation comes in. There will usually be quite a lot of information on a company website. It is necessary to split all this information up into chunks like headlines in a newspaper. A user can then scan your menus very quickly and then click on the categories they wish to find out more about. These 'headlines' provide the basis for a site menu. The site menu is the main component provided to allow users to navigate your site and find out if you provide what they are looking for.

You can also lead viewers of your site towards areas you are trying to promote, new products and services etc. This can be managed within the content of the site using eye catching graphics and text in the right places on the page.

'Is this a company I want to do business with?'
First impressions are important, the layout of your site needs to reflect your corporate image. People are impressed by well packaged sites, but will become frustrated if they cant get to the information they want quickly enough. It is important to maintain the right balance between attractive professional graphic design and the presentation of the site content and company message.

Most companies want their sites to be highly visible to search engines which rely on the text within a site to provide the information they require. This has to be provided as plain text. Search engines will not recognise text that has been created as part of a graphic., it may look nice but it won't manage the very important job of bringing vistors to your site.