Web Design Development Articles

A website is a marketing tool, designed ultimately to boost your company’s sales. Yet so many web designers (and the companies that employ such web designers) neglect to use basic marketing principles to benefit the website.

The focus for web design/websites seems to be around two things;

• getting a stunning web design
• getting visitors to the website.

For many business websites (I have found small businesses websites to be particularly guilty of this) there is little thought to basic marketing principles. Such marketing principles are used elsewhere but for some reason many do not seem to use them when designing websites. So the question is, what marketing principles should you adhere to when designing a website?

Well the number one issue to consider is what message do you want to give to customers? This is also known as a positioning statement.

In my experience this is probably the hardest part of developing an website marketing strategy (or any marketing strategy).

To start you really need to define the type of visitors you want to attract to your website, consider:

• how old are they?
• what do they like?
• what problems / reservations do they have regarding similar products to yours?

You then need to create a message that appeals to them (sounds obvious but many neglect this). Personally I like to look at the problems customers may associate with similar products and then create statements to counter them. The statements are then written for the target web audience. For example if I am writing a message for a younger audience I may use different language to if I am writing for an older audience.

Next choose the most important reservation and counter argument, this will be the one to base the website around. Many try and use many statements on their website and in my experience this does not work. Delivering one message in a website usually works better than trying to pack your website with numerous statements.

How you deliver the message will depend upon your web design and the intended audience, but remember website visitors are lazy and do not like reading text, so use images where possible. Finally you must remember to back your statement up! Any website can claim anything, web users know this, so try and backup your statement. Do you have testimonials, case studies or some other way for the visitor to see how good you are?

Hope you find this useful!

We often put web design and marketing hints and tips on our blog http://redspiderwebdesign.wordpress.com so feel free to pay it a visit.