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When you decide that it's time to create your new website or update your existing one, let us help you come up with the correct design for your on-line goals. Items to consider include: business goals, target market, navigation options, site layout, and number of templates. We'll describe briefly what these different items are and how it can affect the design of your site.

<Top> <Market> <Navigation> <Layout> <Templates> Your business goals are what your website is trying to portray and accomplish on The Web. These include your general look and feel such as color scheme, fonts, and graphics. Do you want the corporate blues and greys, or the warmer greens and browns of small business? This site for example portrays a more creative and colorful style but keeps a consistant professional image.

Besides branding your company, your website needs to accomplish more measureable goals. Some measureable goals may be lead generation, offering a free or billable service, providing customer service to existing clients, or persuading prospects to chose your company over a competitor's. Knowing what you want to accomplish with your website makes it easier to evaluate its effectiveness.

<Top> <Goals> <Navigation> <Layout> <Templates> Your target market may or maynot have a substantial affect on your website design. However if you can narrow your focus to a specific demographic portion of on-line users, you may be able to better target your ideal customer. Factors such as age, sex, or region of the country or the world that you are targeting can influence design. This needs to be considered on an individual case basis, but Magical Page Productions believes strongly in finding your niche and focusing your energies on attacking your ideal customer.

<Top> <Goals> <Market> <Layout> <Templates> The importance of navigation is one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of a website. Providing content and links to it on your website does not constitute useful navigation. Navigation needs to be intuitive and easily followed. There are industry standards that visitors will expect to find on your site as well as imaginative innovations that can make your site more engaging and user-friendly. Mouse roll-overs and Flash animation can also add interactivity and usefullness when appropriate.

You also want to direct visitors down a path of your choosing. It is typically not wise to suggest that visitors randomly visit pages on your website. If a visitor can quickly determine what path to take, you can direct that person effectively and accomplish the goals for which your site was designed.

<Top> <Goals> <Market> <Navigation> <Templates> The site layout or sitemap of your website can greatly affect how useful it is to your visitors. Typically people to not want to have to click more than two or three times in order to find what they are looking for on your site. In the design phase, you want to make your site as "flat" as possible, but still maintain its effectiveness. Typically, the deeper down a path a visitor has to go to find what he needs the better the chances are of "getting lost". Any a "lost" visitor is much more likely to go elsewhere than to try again.

<Top> <Goals> <Market> <Navigation> <Layout> The term template is used in various ways when discussing websites so let us give you our definition. A template is a general page layout with defined locations for text, graphics, and navigation. It does not mean you pick from a list of previously designed layouts. Everything Magical Page Productions does is custom to each client.

However, a custom website may contain more than one template depending on its functionality. Often times the home page of a site is different from the content pages. Also if you have an image gallery, works page, or graphical testimonials, they may have a look all their own. When designing a site you need to consider all its functionality in order to determine whether multiple templates will be needed.