Yesterday we concluded a 30 part series on low cost web site design secrets. You can always read the entire series by going to the low cost web site design category.

Today, we’re asking a different question - in web site design, does function influence design? The short answer is yes. The long answer is “yes, but” and we’ll get into that in a moment.

First, let’s look at why we’re asking the question in the first place.

Many times, when people come to me for a unique web site style, they aren’t in the right part of the process to be looking for a designer. Either the site is already built, and they should have found a real designer before deploying the site, or they are still at the stage of thinking where they know that starting a new business means that they need a website, but they don’t know why.

One of the questions you need to answer before you go to a web designer is, “what will this website do to increase profits for the company?” The answer may be an indirect correlation - better public relations. In that case, you may need a design that incorporates a forum or a weblog. Or you might realize that you can capture leads or make sales directly from the web.

A public relations site is going to have a different format from a leads capture site.

Now we get to the “yes, but”. You might find out that you need more than one site, or a site that is built with expansion in mind. For some businesses, it is smarter to have one site for capturing leads, and another for getting visitors from search engines. Or you may need to have one purely commercial site, and another that simply exists to inform, which drives traffic to the other website.

If you aren’t sure why you need a site in the first place, or what you want your site to do, one solution is to have a short consultation with your web site designer and your marketing department before moving forward. Between them, they can come up with a plan for executive review.

Nina

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