Every website should have a reason to exist. It may be for information, entertainment, marketing a product or services or maybe just a brochure for your business.
Anyone landing on the site will be there because they want whatever it is brought then there. It doesn't matter if this is from a search engine, a social media post, advert, email marketing, a forum, blog or news site or even the dead tree press. They are on your site because they want to read, look at or buy whatever it is you are offering.
They don't really care about your palette, the font, logo, ethos, background, skills or anything else. All they want is the thing.
When I go to BBC news I'm there because I want to read the news. I go to Amazon to buy stuff. I look at images on entertainment sites. What I don't want is lots of guff and fluff getting in the way.
It's not your website. It's a website for your visitors. What you like doesn't matter, you design the site to meet the needs of your visitors.
Start your design with the content. if you don't have the content you can't design a site. You need to plan the navigation system, calls to action, internal linking, pages structures and so on. You need to source images and write the words. Consider legal and privacy. Work out the interactions (such as allowing comments) and information flows.
Once everything is in place, test. Get people to play with the site to makes sure everything works. Use software to track how people navigate, how long they spend on a page, where they click and most importantly, if they convert.
Once you have everything working you can now design the look of the site. But design it on a phone. Don't build the site on you 60 inch high res super screen. Design it to work on a phone first and then on your desktop.
Get the content > build the functional site > test > create the styling.
Anyone landing on the site will be there because they want whatever it is brought then there. It doesn't matter if this is from a search engine, a social media post, advert, email marketing, a forum, blog or news site or even the dead tree press. They are on your site because they want to read, look at or buy whatever it is you are offering.
They don't really care about your palette, the font, logo, ethos, background, skills or anything else. All they want is the thing.
When I go to BBC news I'm there because I want to read the news. I go to Amazon to buy stuff. I look at images on entertainment sites. What I don't want is lots of guff and fluff getting in the way.
It's not your website. It's a website for your visitors. What you like doesn't matter, you design the site to meet the needs of your visitors.
Start your design with the content. if you don't have the content you can't design a site. You need to plan the navigation system, calls to action, internal linking, pages structures and so on. You need to source images and write the words. Consider legal and privacy. Work out the interactions (such as allowing comments) and information flows.
Once everything is in place, test. Get people to play with the site to makes sure everything works. Use software to track how people navigate, how long they spend on a page, where they click and most importantly, if they convert.
Once you have everything working you can now design the look of the site. But design it on a phone. Don't build the site on you 60 inch high res super screen. Design it to work on a phone first and then on your desktop.
Get the content > build the functional site > test > create the styling.