North Star

The design of your site is comprised of aesthetics, navigation and content placement. If any of these three elements are lacking, your site will be underperforming.

Aesthetics
The “look and feel” of your site should be in keeping with the investment you’ve made in your brand elements - logo, colors, fonts, themes and core messages. Any significant departure from these fundamentals is shortchanging your organizations express identity. (Yes, that’s harsh, but true.)

So start by taking a look at what you look like in other places - your logo, business cards, brochures, newsletters, etc. If you don’t have any of these items in place, that’s okay - we can deal with that while still ramping up the website project.

With a clear understanding of your brand identity, we begin exploring how the home page will be structured - what sort of content will need to be “front and center”?

We also want to identify what sort of photography you have available for us to use in building out your site. In most cases photography is essential to solid web design. If you don’t have a good image library, that’s okay. We can either have a photographer work with you or reference stock images, although the former is preferable in most cases.

Once we have all the tools we need to build out the initial page of your site, the design moves from concept to creative - the phase in which we “mock up” your home page. This sets the tone for all of the interior pages.

Navigation
How are people going to get around your set? What is the pattern for finding the info they’re looking for? Will you use top navigation with drop-down menus (such as this site), side navigation with fly-out menus (www.terrisfight.org), or perhaps even a Flash build-out (www.exumphoto.com)?

Clean, simple navigation is desirable for most commercial and non-profits. You want people to be able to find information easily, not leave in frustration.

With significant experience in helping clients think through best-practice navigation, NSMC can help you evaluate which navigation structure would work best with your design concept. The result is a site experience that makes sense to the user and enables them to find what they came for without difficulty.

Content Placement
While good aesthetics and solid navigation are foundational for your site, content placement, however is where many otherwise good sites end up in the drink. You’ve got to have meaningful, helpful, sufficient content to offer value to your viewers. And not just content, but well-structured content. Logically-placed content. Well-worded links, coherent message flow, and helpful search tools. After all, what good is excellent content if no one can find it in your site to actually read it?

Be deliberate about who writes your copy. Grammar, spelling and usage matter. And don’t expect your copywriter to be able to read your mind. Give them sufficient information to represent you well.

If you’re not a writer, and no one in your organization claims to be a writer, let NSMC help you distill your messaging into meaningful, tight copy. The end result will be worth the additional investment to make your organization “sound good” on-line.