effective online strategies for smaller businesses
Web Design and Graphics
An effective website captures the right audience and conveys the right message in a persuasive manner. While not rocket surgery, there are several parts to the puzzle that all need to work together:
- capturing the right audience: you need the right keywords in the right places both in your code and your actual readable information. this is what "search engine optimisation" is all about;
- conveying your message: a clear message that convinces prospective clients that you are a professional, forward-looking, trustworthy organisation. this is what good branding and clean visual design are all about;
- a usable website: you need an "usable" web, i.e. it must be fast and easy to understand and to use;
- decision-friendly user experience: your website must make clear what is on offer, then make it easy for people to choose you;
- build, maintain relations: your website should contribute to your organisation's efforts in developing and maintaining client relations. Good on-line content and e-newsletters are the key points here, as well as getting feedback from your visitors (questionnaires, surveys, polls).
Itchycloud addresses all of the issues above in an efficient, functional manner. We want nothing between you and your audience to impede or clog your message: keep your channel clear. As we do visual design, and get into graphic images or Flash, we will make you aware of the unavoidable trade-offs, then help you decide how best to proceed.
Good process, good website design
Proper project management makes for effective websites, and, when handled properly, enables rather than obstructs imaginative creative design.
Our logical design process makes for speedy, cost-effective delivery; project milestones, deliverables and client sign-offs ensure that we deliver what you require, not what we like.
Each project proceeds in logical steps:
- project aims and scope, technical and budgetary constraints, market profiling (who visits and what would you like them to do?)
- performance benchmarks, keyword analysis, content analysis, task analysis
- functional specification, user-informed iterative wireframing
- branding/identity, visual design
- back-end issues (databases, cms, forms)
- coding
- QA/UA testing
- development of support/maintenance/training framework
- user-testing tweaking, and launch considerations
- current and future (anticipated) goals, interdependencies and constraints.
While your website may have informative content, typically wonky visual design, bad navigation and annoying broken links make for poor usability. Furthermore, key pages are often overloaded with useless graphics, clogging your message and making for slow downloads. Finally, both code and readable text on key pages are usually search engine-unfriendly, with over-reliance on graphic images to convey important information - images are not readable by search engines!