Web Design Best Practices to Identify Your Target Audience
September 11th, 2017
It is a well-known fact that designing a website takes a lot of time and money. Even if you aren’t the one doing the heavy lifting, you may have to find a good designer to do it for you. If you are a web designer yourself, you still require tools and resources like a good domain name, a reliable web hosting, etc. By knowing the target audience your future website will be catering to, the designer will try to reproduce the look and feel that associates with the above audience. A worthy reason to get it right the very first time.
It takes experience and skill to have a feel for successful web design.
Keeping that in mind, we have put together a list of professional ideas that will guide you in the right path before building your WordPress site so that your website matches up with customer expectations. So let us see how to identify your target audience and what is the method to create a design that will boost traffic?
Do some research
The very first step is to do some research. If you want to create engaging content for your audience, you need to know what they need, and the only way to find out is by asking or reading about it.
Research of audience demographic (age, sex, geography) will allow you to become an online presence that sticks to your audience’s ideas and expectations. After you get this basic demographic data right, you may have to dig deeper and find out their interests and needs. This cab is easily done through a thorough survey.
Formal research methods like questionnaires, surveys, interviews etc. never lose their scope. Add to it latest inputs from forums, Facebook groups, Quora, etc. and explore what they are talking about.
Having gathered all this information, you will be able to create an idea of the qualities of people you will be designing for. Eventually, implementing this idea through a designer will help you realize if your design tactics will help you achieve your goals.
Scout your competition
Your competition can be used as reference for your web design.
The choice of color, font or even template may be an important but a confusing decision to make. At these times, your competitors’ website will have a lot of information, especially the successful ones. Take a look at all of them to find out what they have in common to make a wise market decision.
Finding the best templates available for your industry and what type of magazine themes they go with is also something that deserves your time. You could get some insights from these templates as whoever designed them is sure to have done some market research so that it suits the business type.
Layout
The modern mind likes a minimalistic design. Your webpage doesn’t need to be too beautiful to attract audience. Your design should be able to cater to a wide audience. You can go for simple magazine style themes.
Your website is sure to be viewed from a host of devices like mobiles, tablets and desktops. A responsive theme isn’t the end of things. An over complicated website may behave badly even in the best responsive design.
So, make sure that your layout is clean and aligns perfectly to meet your users expect. Remember, it is more important to be efficient than just pretty.
Don’t sacrifice usability and accessibility for bells and whistles that may chase users away!
Content
It’s true that content is king, especially in web design. Your design should be such that it complements the content rather than being the stand out guy.
Think about how you can customize your design lines so that it helps your content to stand out. It should be easy to read and pave way for effective conversions to occur. This is imperative in cases of discussion forums or review sites. People will tolerate a badly designed website if it gives them the required info but you still run the risk of low bounce rates if the design just makes them confused.
Content is what will keep users on your website so it is usually one of the most important parts.
Put yourself in their shoes
Who else to test your website than the person who has done the ground work, has interest in the niche and knows the expectations of the audience. So put those dancing shoes on, it’s time for some theatre. Put yourself in the user’s shoes. Imagine what you would be looking for in the site, which side of the screen you would see first, where you would click, and how you would navigate in the site. It will help you gain insights about what to do and also prioritize.
Look at your own website from a different perspective as if you were the user.
Remember, is may happen that you would be carried away by our own opinions while being engrossed in the design process, so double checking can go a long way in keeping you in line with the user’s needs.
Add some personal touches
Customizing is a tough job if you are not a designer. But putting a bit of a personality in every detail will make your user feel more comfortable and engaged. It may be as small as changing the color of the template to importing new payment methods.
Colors play a special role conveying a certain idea, meaning and sometimes, feelings. So it comes as no surprise that colors play an important role in web design. Choosing the right color is not an easy task. Some factors to take into account are the demographic (age, sex, geography) of the target audience, the message you want to communicate, the feelings you want to associate with the brand etc.
Fonts have their fair share in targeting your audience as well. For example, if the website is for a younger audience, you can go for a fun scripted font, while a corporate website may go well with a conservative font. It depends on your personal likings in the end.
Keep your marketing goals in mind
This will help you go in the right direction and make better decisions from scratch.
Check metrics and make adjustments
You can make use of Google Analytics to keep track of audience statistics. Analyze these statistics to find out the strengths and weakness of your website. Make small adjustments if needed.
Wrap up
When designing a website, the above tips are sure to help achieve the desired effect on your target audience.
Making sure that your audience are happy with your website depends on how you deal with your design in a professional manner.
Knowing how these factors will affect your website will go a long way in creating an audience focused website.
Catherrine Garcia is a passionate blogger and a freelance Web Developer. She along with her group of freelance developers, are experts of creating Websites on CMS.
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