brochure sites

The vast majority of websites that belong to businesses and organisations are ‘brochure’ sites in so far as they are not trying to sell anything online. Brochure sites can have a variety of objectives including marketing, information, advice, lobbying, communication within a community, discussion forum and so on. For the most part they tend to be 'static'’ sites: there is often no need for the site to interact with the viewer. This does not mean that brochure sites should not be exciting, topical and creative. But there are a few factors which should be taken into account when planning a brochure site:

What are the objectives for the site?

Unless you have well defined objectives the site will lack focus and it will not communicate clearly and effectively and you are probably wasting valuable opportunities to exploit the power of communicating over the web.

Who is your target audience?

Understanding who you are trying to reach and influence will dictate the style and tone of language, the layout and ordering of information, the choice of images and so on. Website technology is now so powerful it can enable targets to be hit with the precision of a rifle providing they have been carefully defined and understood.

What do they want?

Browsing the web tends to be a focussed activity, people make very specific searches and have little time or patience with irrelevant or nebulous results. Take search engines as an example. The most successful, popular and profitable search engine with 81% market share is Google and its home page has little more on it than their logo, a search box and a few word links. Yahoo with 10% market share has ads and categories and God knows what. Likewise MSN with a paltry 3% share has a home page full of panels with flashing ads and other visual clutter. Clear, useful and honest communication can’t be that hard can it? We don't think so. Take a look at this short but fascinating video about eye tracking from Etre’s wonderful website: www.etre.com

How should the content be organised?

Websites usually provide the means for users to find their own way around according to their particular interests and needs. Good navigation systems will take them quickly to where they want to go with the minimum of clicks without distraction or irritation. Putting one’s mind into the mind of ‘everyman’ visitor is part of the trick and it is not necessarily an easy trick to perform. We have known clients who have marketing data sheets with no title apart from the product code number used as the large heading at the top! We have known designers who blame the client for not spotting that a tiny, subtle, almost invisible scribble is, in fact, the link he is groping around for. Things need not look like Fisher Price 'My First Website' but we are never more than a click away from loosing a visitor.

How can I get it planned out and organised?

As with every project at Logo we analyse a job in order to cost it. Unless we have enough knowledge of the project to assess how long it will take us and what resources we need to complete it , our cost will be inaccurate and we may loose the job through being uncompetitive or under quote and be out of pocket as a result (we always charge what we quote, never more) see our website briefing form. As part of this process we will draw up a progression chart showing crucial milestones for us, our client and sub contractors along with any payment stages. A simple progress chart may look something like this with milestone dates heading the right hand columns:

We will draw up a schematic representation of the site to show how the navigation will work: how things connect to each other and what is sequential or hierarchical. This diagram shows the main components of a holiday cottage booking website which uses a CMS which interfaces with a back office system to provide online availability checks, bookings and payment.

A schema will inform the structure of the navigation system to be employed. In all the wild anarchy of the web there are certain conventions and – dare we say – rules which have grown up. Although it can be fun to discard these rules at times, it is usually wise to be mindful of what the visitor will be expecting, it is what ergonomics is about, it’s why the brake is always to the left of the accelerator pedal.

What happens next?

After all that dull, dry, boring stuff we don our smocks and easels and make a right old mess being creative with string and glue to produce stunning visuals for the home page and for any other major parts of the site. Once these have been approved – and not until then – we make the master artwork and then code it into whatever language is required (HTML, Java, PHP, ABC and XYZ) and Bob’s your uncle. Usually work in progress can be monitored by the client by logging into a secure area one of our web servers.

Alive and kicking or dead in the water?

Search engines strive to return useful, relevant information. As a consequence they use various criteria to assess which websites contain information which is likely to answer most accurately the needs of the searcher. They use a variety of algorithms (mathematical formulae) to assess the relevance of a website to particular search strings and they also tend to favour sites where the content is regularly changed and updated. Increasingly the sites we build have at least one or two sections which the clients manage themselves. Latest news and current job vacancies are obvious areas to use a content management system (CMS) without the risk of tampering with carefully designed ‘editorial’ pages. In practice there are usually other areas of a website where the client should be in control and actively maintaining. This can only happen if there is the conviction on part of the client to devote company time on a regular basis to refreshing the content of their website. Our CMS system is so affordable and quick to learn and easy to use it seems crazy to have a site without it.

CMS system priced from: £1,250 / $1,750 / €1,350

Testing, testing

One of the final stages of the build process is to test the new site on all the popular web browsers and operating systems. Some funny things can happen: what looks great on a Mac running Safari can look like a dog's dinner on Firefox on a PC. Even different versions of Internet Explorer will display code in a different way, or not at all sometimes! Screen resolutions are getting better and better and now only 4.5% of surfers have a screen resolution of 600 x 800 pixels which is the size most websites are still being built to. We work to 1224 x 768 pixels for most standard sites these days and we can't wait for everyone to go HD wide screen… rollllll onnnnn.

Monitoring performance

Watching how visitors to your website behave is key to not only understanding what interests them but also what works well and what doesn’t. As a matter of course we include Google Analytics or other site statistics coding into the sites we build. It’s free and it tells you day by day not only how many visitors you have had but also which pages they visited and in what order, how long they stayed, where they were when they left. It tells you where they came from, what search engines directed them and which words and phrases they typed in to the search engines. As with any marketing data, it is at its most useful if it is monitored over a period and also when things change.

Call to action

A 'brochure site' need not be passive and various techniques are used to furnish sales leads, build mailing lists, encourage real world contact and so on. Actions elicited by the site can offer a useful means of measuring performance. Regardless of anything else, in the 21st century you can be sure visitors to your website will judge you and your operation increasingly by the way you present yourself there. You cannot afford not to take your website seriously and so, for our call to action, e-mail: enquiries@logodesign.co.uk, or better still, call us on 01752 830000, it will cost you nothing and can you really afford not to?