A Guide to Creating the Perfect Web Environment

What makes a perfect web environment? It is more than just a great look. It must have the right look for the purposes it is designed to fulfill. To design the perfect web environment, a designer needs to focus on the purpose of the site as well as on making it look nice. The skills that a designer gains with experience will help the designer make good looking sites, but it is the focus on the purpose of the site that will help the designer home in on the right look for that particular web environment.

Choosing the Right Design for the Site

To choose the right design for the site, you need to know the product first. If you don't know what is being presented on the site, you are flying blind. The more you can learn about the product, the better off you will be. Choosing the right design for a web environment is like choosing the right pair of shoes to sell to a customer. In order to make the sell, the shoes you are offering to the customer must fit that particular customer. In order to find the right fit, you need to know the size of the customer's foot, taking into account additional variables such as width, height, and shape. But just finding a shoe that fits the foot isn't enough. You also need to find a shoe that that particular customer wants, and that depends on the customer's tastes (not yours!) and on what the customer is planning to use the shoes for. A customer looking for running shoes isn't going to select a pair of dress shoes, no matter how nice they look.

Similarly, for a website, looking good and running smoothly is not enough. The perfect web environment also needs to fit the purpose for which it is being designed. Here are a couple of questions web designers should ask themselves about the product they are designing for. 1) Who will be interested in this product? Young or old, male or female, the business man or carpenter? A designer who knows the target demographics for the product will be leaps and bounds ahead of one who does not. 2) What are the characteristics of the product? Is it simple or complex, clean or rugged, flashy or conservative? How is this product better than the alternatives? The more the designer knows, the easier it will be to craft designs that fit.

Putting Ideas into Action

After sufficiently researching the product and the target audience, the designer is ready to apply this knowledge in crafting the perfect web environment. The style of the site should be chosen to appeal to the target audience, even if the designer personally prefers a different style. Characteristics of the product should also be worked into the site design. For example, if the product is sleek, the web environment should be sleek. If the product is rugged, the site should be as well. A site design that runs counter to the product design or marketing can drive away customers. Designers need to use what they know to guide their development of the web environment.

Design with Flexibility in Mind

Every website needs to be changed sooner or later. Just like fashions, the style of a site today may not carry the same appeal tomorrow. The target audience may change over time, and even the product itself may undergo significant revisions. For all of these reasons, web designers need to craft their web environments to be flexible.

One common pitfall is for designers to become attached to particular ideas or designs and become unwilling to change them. In the face of change, this can cause a perfect web environment to degrade into an ineffective one. Regardless of the designer's personal preferences, the effectiveness of the site needs to remain the top priority. On the one hand, this means that the designer will need to continue to devote time to the project, but the benefit is a web environment that stays perfect even when circumstances change.