When you build a website you are essentially creating a commercial product. While you may not necessarily charge for access to your site, you are nevertheless deigning your site with the general public in mind and it’s the traffic here that will bring you your profits (even if not directly). In short then, when you design a site it’s important to do it in a way that your visitors will appreciate and that will get you the most hits and you should build your entire layout and all your content around this simple fact.

Don’t Design For Yourself

However, obvious though this may seem, the unfortunate reality is that many people forget who they are designing for and create a site instead that is very much aimed at… well themselves normally. They start to design a site, but rather than thinking about what their visitors might want, they will instead design it based on what looks good. All fine and well, except that what looks good to you might not necessarily look good to your target audience.

Even worse you might find out that not only is your web design not right for the audience, but that perhaps your entire business plan isn’t right either. You might find out unfortunately that there is simply no demand for the kind of website you are building. And that’s a problem.

Who Are You Designing For?

So what helps then is to keep in mind at all times, who it is that you are making this site for and what it is that someone who fits their description is likely to want to see. Now a large business with lots of money to pour into a website design will probably do this by doing a lot of market research in order to find out what it is that their audience wants, and specifically who their audience is made up of.

Think About Your Visitors

However the problem for you is that you might not have access necessarily to the kinds of resources to do market research, so instead you need to just think about the kind of person you are designing for. And even better to think about someone specific in your life that you think will appreciate your site design. This then in other words means that you will then make your website for that person and you will give it all the little bells and whistles that that person will like. Better yet is to make your site for that person and their friends, or a group of people, but then you can start to really design a site that they and their friends will really enjoy.

What Would Joe Like?

This then makes it far easier for you to think about your site in terms of your target audience because now you know the kind of person visiting your page and what they will like. Each time you come to a decision such as ‘black or blue’? You then just ask yourself ‘what would Joe like?’ and you design it thusly. And the best part of all this? Once you release your site you’ll have at least one person who will likely be a fan – and they’ll be in contact with various other like-minded people too.

Bren Hammel is a web design expert with a web design Newcastle company EurekaSEM. Bren always thinks about conversions, navigation and usability when he is designing a website.