Before designing and building up your business website, always consider the nature of designer you want for that particular website. Most of the business owners recommend company designers instead of freelance designers. Freelance designers will only work with the vision to accomplish your project but on the other hand, company designers set a goal, plan a well knit design strategy and then start working on that web design. It is notable that experience and skilled company designers not only consider search engine friendly factors but they also comply with user feasibility features. Once Jacob Gube in his interview quoted about the actual role of a designer in the following words:
Build things because you want to solve a problem that other people have, not because you want to solve your problem of how you’re going to pay rent next month”. ~ Jacob Gube, founder of Six Revisions
So the overall concept is to highlight the importance of planning and designing a strategy before working on any web design project. Before giving you a hidden message or strategy behind the world famous social networks’ web designs, let me sort out the elements which are taken into account when we talk about a perfect design strategy.
Setting up Goals through Strategic Design
Setting goals and objectives before the website production is a core tactic that every designer must follow. I am again quoting Jacob’s quotation to strengthen my point, so don’t mind as I consider him as a maestro of this industry . According to him:
The most critical step you need to take in a traditional commercial website production project is to determine what the site’s primary goal is. You then create the site with that goal as your guiding light.
A designer must interact with the business owner in order to get the complete picture of what he wants to get out of his website. What are his primary business objectives and how they should be implemented into the web design of the site?
Exploring your Audience
All designers know that a website should be user-friendly but have they ever tried to explore the website’s targeted audience as yet? No! The only reason is that they consider themselves as professional designers and there is a misconception that whatever design suits the designers will also match with the users’ taste. That’s not true. The designers have to first explore the taste and likeness of the website’s targeted audience in order to create the perfect design for a website.
If you offer value to your customers through your design, as a result, they will nurture leads for your business.
Defining you Business through Clear Visual Representation
The visual representation that has been used all over the website is the most essential part of your design strategy. Use clear and attractive images in the sliders, content and on different pages so that a user can identify your business roles in the first sight.
These are some clear cut objectives and information related to any web design strategy and its components. Let’s talk about the design strategies that are being followed by world famous social networks.
Facebook: A Simple Layout but Countless Networking Opportunities
Facebook, a well known and the most famous social channel with countless networking opportunities. Starting from its home page, the design is a perfect example of user-friendly and feasibility features because the home page itself is enough to inform a new user about its functions. Easy accessibility is a foremost feature of Facebook because a user does not need to scroll down the page. He gets the whole picture in the first sight. Its color, fonts, forms and each and everything is just an example of perfection.
Sign in and sign up forms are all placed on the home page with decent form structure. Not only this, when a user logs in to his/her account he/she finds all the related stuff on the top so that the user does not need to scroll down. For instance pages, groups, apps friends’ updates and chat box are all placed on the visible spots and can be accessed without scrolling down if it is accessed from a device having standard screen resolution.
“Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” That’s the mission of Facebook and somehow it has marvelously achieved its goals through its strategic design.
LinkedIn: Connecting Millions of Professionals with a Few Clicks
This network is known as being the world leading professional social channel that allows you to discover more and more professionals. Like Facebook, this social channel also allows you with the facility of easy accessibility of all major features. As it is different from other platforms, it has a unique design strategy that allows the users to analyze who viewed their profiles and the features like skills endorsements and recommendations give a unique touch to LinkedIn.
Unlike Facebook, it serves many decent features that are only feasible for a professional. Due to these design strategies, it has been ranked amongst the top social networks.
Pinterest: Simply Pin your Interest!
Pinterest is a great example of a successful web design strategy because it’s not an old platform but its popularity is being competed with the world’s leading social networks. It is totally based on visual representations, so the whole design strategy revolves around boards containing different images attracting its users. The images of different sizes and resolutions are arranged in such a creative way that not a single image appears to be out of its place or out of proportion.
Long story short, every website contains a different design strategy that attracts its perspective users. If you are successful in building up a powerful design strategy for your website then it would be a great chance for you to drive a huge fraction of traffic towards your platform.
