In real estate, it’s loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion. In web­site design, it’s con­tent, con­tent, con­tent… fol­lowed very closely by eye appeal, which is where a graphic designer can play a sub­stan­tial role.

The SEO (Search Engine Opti­miza­tion) por­tion of a website’s foun­da­tion must be con­sid­ered first to develop essen­tial key­words. These key­words are then used through­out the site copy, the attend­ing blog, and the mar­ket­ing arti­cles which will pro­lif­er­ate incom­ing links, some­thing the ever-hungry search engines love.

If a gor­geous movie star becomes severely ill, her beauty becomes unim­por­tant. This same con­cept holds true for web­site devel­op­ment. By build­ing the func­tion­al­ity first for a web­site, and then adding beauty — an appeal­ing graph­i­cal look — sec­on­dar­ily, the pur­pose for hav­ing the web­site is well served.

Many peo­ple who read web pages and view their images are moti­vated by what they “like” ver­sus what they “need,” so the key role of graph­ics assumes an impor­tance right after func­tion­al­ity, SEO, and con­tent. The con­tent plus the graph­ics appeal are what leads to con­ver­sion on a site.

Your web­site is a mar­ket­ing tool. It is the key way you gain pres­ence and cred­itabil­ity on the inter­net. It’s the way you turn eye appeal into buy appeal. The appear­ance of your web­site is the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of all of the ideas you want to put forth under the umbrella of your busi­ness and they deserve thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion prior to the cre­ation of a graph­i­cal appearance.

1. Have you defined your tar­get mar­ket and do you know what will appeal to them visually?
2. What is the actual pur­pose behind your site? To sell, to enter­tain, to enlighten?
3. What is the prod­uct you are offer­ing? How should it be posi­tioned in the mar­ket and how should it look?
4. Is your graph­ics theme con­sis­tent? Is your brand­ing car­ried through­out the site as well as in your prod­uct line?
5. Have you gath­ered fill in pho­tos or cre­ated con­sis­tent graph­ics such as bul­lets that match in color and typeface?

The design of pages in a web­site must first be func­tional, and then have eye appeal graph­i­cally. A great web designer will use the appro­pri­ate soft­ware to per­mit all jpeg and gif files to either load quickly or to hyper­link the images to load in a new page. A great web designer will use alt tags to describe the images in the cod­ing behind these images so that the search engine spi­ders and read them and rank the page accordingly.

Some key graph­i­cal ele­ments that can be used in web­site design are:

1. Brand­ing. Think of brand­ing as pre­defin­ing what a com­pany is all about in the minds of its clients. It encom­passes all the fac­tors that makeup both the recog­ni­tion and inter­ac­tion parts of doing busi­ness with that com­pany. Brand­ing helps to estab­lish a sense of per­ceived value for your com­pany, your prod­uct and your deliv­ery of a ser­vice. Sim­ply by see­ing your graph­ics pieces, peo­ple will begin to iden­tify with what val­ues you are striv­ing to achieve.

2. Logo. Your logo should rep­re­sent what your com­pany stands for and what func­tion it per­forms. The best logos are sophis­ti­cated and sim­ple, and they are chal­leng­ing to design. Your logo should have a strong, bal­anced image with no extras to clut­ter its look. Bold logos are eas­ier to see than those with thin del­i­cate lines.

3. Tag Lines. You would be well served to research the tag lines of other com­pa­nies before you design your own. These few words can become part of the brand­ing that tells peo­ple graph­i­cally who you are, what you do, and how you do it. My tag line is “Where Your Ideas Become Dis­tinc­tive Designs.”

Try to keep the size of your web pages in the vicin­ity of 50K. When you hire a web­site designer, this size web page will still give a rel­a­tively fast down­load time on a stan­dard modem, although dial up access to the inter­net has waned with the insur­gence of broad­band and FIOS. If your site or any of its pages loads slowly, you will have to ask your designer to size down the graphic images, replace them with a smaller images, or replace them with the HTML default bul­lets, hor­i­zon­tal rules, or col­ored head­ing text.

About the Author

Are YOU ready to cre­ate a pow­er­ful brand and web­site that deliv­ers? Karen Saun­ders, owner of Mac­Graph­ics Ser­vices, and her out­stand­ing team can lead you through her inte­grated 7-step brand­ing and web­site launch sys­tem. For a FREE 60 min audio “Put the Bling Into Your Brand” and to learn about her excep­tional brand­ing, graph­ics, and web­site design ser­vices: http://www.BrandingAndWebsiteDesign.com.

© 2010, admin. Copy­right 2009. All rights reserved.

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Tags: Appeal, Branding, Graphics, tips, website

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Advertising, SEO, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.