Website and Graphic Design
Website and Graphic Design
This article was first published on July 13, 1998.
Who you want to visit the Web Site?
This may seem like a pointless question, but if your content would be of interest to a certain group of people then you need to think about how to present the content in such a way that will make interested people explore your site further. This can influence the colours and fonts you use and even the way the site is organised and graphic usage.
The simplest ways to group people is by age and gender. Compare several magazines or Web Sites that are obviously aimed at different age groups and gender.
For example; the Teletubbies Magazine is aimed at very young children of both sexes, it is full of large pictures, bright colours and small amounts of text which is printed using a large, bold font. Whereas Q Magazine, targeted towards male 18-28 uses a smaller palette of colours, photographs that are often large and bold, and much smaller print.
Once published on the Web anyone with Internet access will be able to view your site. How the public find out about your site will determine, to a certain extent, who will visit your site. For instance, if you add your Web Site address to adverts in newspapers or magazines people attracted by your advert could visit your Web Site. For this reason you will need to offer more than just a straight copy of your standard advertisement, there must be a reason for visiting your site.
A person may come across your site after searching for a specific piece of information, or after finding a link in one of the many search engines, or even after following a link from another Web Site. By now you may have realised that you likely audience is going to be rather varied and because of this you need to devise ways of keeping the attention of those that have a genuine interest in what you have to offer. On commercial Web sites you want to make the visitors who have 'surfed in' to remember your site should they have a need for your services/products at a later date.
All of these factors need to be assessed as part of the design process as they will be useful throughout the next stages of design as well as when you start promoting your Web site.
To summarise you need to consider:
September 7, 2010
