Effective means to achieve the desired effect so the phrase effective web development must mean to fit the purpose for which the website was created for. In other words, to meet requirements. A requirement, one would think, would be most effectively communicated by the individual who requires the website, in this case the business owner. The business owner, afterall, understand his and her business better than anyone else. But this decision maker doesn’t generally understand the field of web design and how the internet can help the business. Therefore, he or she requires guidance from the internet market, web designer of IT professional. In other words, the requirements must be extracted or the end solution may not accurately solve the original problem. This is because we may not really understand the original problem because we did not examine the business and its web design requirements thoroughly enough.

Please note this is an extract for a recent article that we had published on Ezinearticles, click on the link below to view the complete article:

Effective Web Designs

Accessibility is a much talked about web design issue. Help the elderly get online to make their lives easier. Think about it, our post offices are disappearing, public transport can be unreliable and infrequent, especially for those of us who live out in the sticks. The elderly are being encouraged to go online to shop, pay their car tax and do a multitude of other tasks that are possible to do online but quite difficult and time consuming to do at the post office, supermarket or bank. The fact is that many elderly people are starting to use the internet and this trend will only increase.

So why do so many small business owners fail to realise that this trend exists? Many do not have a website because they advertise in the local paper or directory book. I’m not saying stop doing this. But don’t ignore the ever growing trend of online users.

Designing websites which work for the widest possible proportion of your target market should be the aim of every web designer. Multimedia functionality helps to engage users but we’ve seen how Flash animation and navigation is poor in terms of accessibility and can diminish SEO results. So how can we cater for everyone. Well, research shows that a website that we create which can make all users happy. A usable website is good for SEO because it helps to create repeat visitors. Task completion times are shorter which decreases time on site which, it could be argued, is poor in terms of cold, hard SEO metrics. But if we were to take this nonsensical view then we wouldn’t be considering the bigger picture. That is why we should consider all elements of a web presence and look at the end results. Conversions are all that really matters. Web traffic is just that. Traffic.

Ultimately, all website design decision must be justified by mapping back to business objectives. Will our stakeholders like it? Will our customers like it? These are the pertinent questions.