Research Project Web Design

[jack593]

Hello! I'm doing a research project for school on 'How do you design and develop an effective business website?'

As part of the project I need to collect my own primary data, and I would greatly appreciate it if anyone could give their opinion to some of the following questions:

1. How important is it for a business website to be optimised for mobile?

2. Should contact details be displayed on every page?

3. How do you design colour schemes that fit well with the image of the business while being attractive and web friendly?

4. What can easily make a web design go bad?

5. How important are images and graphics in a web design?

Thank you for your time, I look forward to reading any answers I get.

[breno]

1. Paramount, I don't know what the figures are but mobile browsing has sky rocketed over the past few years, you can tell yourself when you visit a site that's not responsive, eck! Its also very important for SEO too now. Rule of thumb lately is to design mobile first, then work your way up to desktop full screen, this method also helps you with managing important content from the least.

2. Some form of contact details should be on every page, namely the footer. Let's say someone finally decides to contact the business for a service or product at an inner page that hasn't got their contact in the footer or somewhere on the page, it can give the user a reason to not follow through, it doesn't take much...

3. I use colour pallete sites like Kuler. I don't know much else besides having an eye and consulting with client about color scheme and typography.

4. Lack of planning, lack of input from client, lack of communication, bad UI, rushing.

5. Not sure, though people generally are more responsive to imagery to draw attention. Font icons and SVG are preferred options where applicable these days I have noticed.

But hey, I haven't been around that long, this is stuff that I've learned from others and try to apply myself.
Hope this helps.

[timbo89]

1. How important is it for a business website to be optimised for mobile?

2. Should contact details be displayed on every page?

3. How do you design colour schemes that fit well with the image of the business while being attractive and web friendly?

4. What can easily make a web design go bad?

5. How important are images and graphics in a web design?

1. I, and most people i know pull out their phone when they're looking for business details, this is one of the most important things when it comes to web design.

2. I wouldn't say this is necessary as long as a contact link is easy to find, this all depends on the business though. (if it's an online store, the contact information doesn't need to be as prominent, if it's a handy man business that takes all of their booking over the phone, you'd want the phone number easy to find on every page)

3. Colours are hard, you need to use something that contrasts well for text, i generally avoid bright colours, they get a bit painful to look at after a while.

4. Responsiveness and browser compatibility, you need to make sure your web design looks good and is functional no matter what browser is being used and what size the browser window is.

5. Images are important to break up the text, but you don't want to go overboard, images will increase the loading time. never use images to display text information, and try to use vector (SVG) images where possible to avoid distortion.

[breno]

Yeah some good points there, timbo.

[jack593]

Thank you everyone for the help! I found both of your answers informative and they definitely helped me with my research project. Thanks once again, I greatly appreciate it.

[TheGAME1264]

1) It can be, but isn't always, important. Some businesses don't require a mobile site since their target market is primarily desktop users; this is mostly true of B2B websites, whereas B2C tends to be more about the mobile devices. So the answer is site-specific.

2) Ideally, yes. Again, it depends on the type of site. Some sites (e.g. WDF) don't need to do it.

3) I'm not a designer, but I use sites like Color Trends + Palettes :: COLOURlovers when I do.

4) The lack of understanding that the design represents maybe 5-10% of what goes into a good site. The content matters. The structure of the site matters. The ability to develop unique features matters. The conversion ratio matters. The design is a step in the road, not the whole road; this is a very common misconception, however.

5) Again, it depends on the site.

Basically, the blanket answer you're looking for is that there are no blanket answers.

[Vapr_Arts]

1. I am a strong advocate of websites being mobile friendly. However the importance of it to a business depends more on the target and industry. For example if your website is made to download/purchase a piece of software for a computer it may not be that important to have it on your phone. True you can be searching the website for info on your phone but overall you will probably be on a computer when using its product. Again I believe every site should be optimized for web but this is just to stay ahead of the curve, and isn't necessarily important to the success of the site.

2. This one is more about preference. If the contact info works well being displayed on every page and that is what the client wants then by all means go for it. If not thats fine too, just as long as when someone does need to find it its easily found.

3. Color choices for me are not part of web design but rather branding. The brand should have a set of colors chosen specifically for that brand. For example if I were creating a site for TMobile then pink would be a color choice but not for say ATT.

If i do have to choose the colors then it brings me to color theory and again to the brand. Which colors work best for the brand. Once I have determined that "this is red and this is blue" i will then either experiment with colors on my own or will use a tool like the website ColourLovers to build a scheme.

4. What exactly do you define "web design" or "bad web design" as? To me the worst thing to do is spend a huge amount of time on the front end when your sites main importance is in the backend. I would much rather have a site that looks bad and work rather than a site that doesn't work but looks pretty.

Not everyone considers web design to cover the backend as well, but I do. If you were talking more about layout the biggest mistake people can make is having an overly complicated navigation. For example my school uses something called BlackBoard. Essentially you log on and it has everything you need for that course. It has your assignments, grades, some teachers have you take quizzes and tests on the site as well. There use to be a problem where when you went to view your grades you couldnt go back to the course page without putting the url in again. That in my opinion is horrible!

5. Extremely important. Consider how visual we are as human beings. Also consider how little amount of time you have to grab someones attention. The number of images are not as important but the decision to choose one image over the other is very crucial. My response yo question 4 I say that the layout/look of a website does not matter if the backend isn't doing its job and I stand by that, but don't mistake that for me saying that the look of a website is not important. The backend is just more important. They definitely are.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk