Purpose of the Company or Website
The most important message that must be communicated by every website is its purpose.
As visitors arrive at the website, they should be able to quickly and accurately understand why the website exists and what is offered, and from this they should be able to determine if it is something that interests them.
Homepage should communicate the purpose
What is offered?
- Visitors should quickly learn what the company or website offers them.
- E-commerce websites need to clearly communicate to visitors the types of products that can be purchased.
- Service companies should clearly communicate the services that are available to visitors.
- Websites that are content-rich, such as blogs, should communicate to new visitors what type of content is available to visitors and subscribers.
How Can Visitors Benefit?
- How these products and services can specifically benefit them and why they would be better off with them.
What Action Can Visitors Take?
- Call to action
- Do something
Tips for Effective Communication:
Now that we’ve looked at how websites communicate with visitors, some typical challenges and what should be communicated, here are some tips that can be put into practice to help with the process of developing websites that communicate effectively.
Prioritize
- Knowing exactly what should be communicated to visitors.
- State the main point, purpose or message of your website, it’s unlikely that visitors will be able to understand that message accurately.
Determine What Visitors Should Know About the Company or Website
- Every company and website has something that it specifically wants visitors to learn about it. It’s critical that this is identified, otherwise it will be impossible to communicate it effectively to visitors. Ideally, the website would be used as a tool to brand the company, so the messages that are being communicated should fit the overall branding efforts and strengthen those efforts.
Keep it Simple
- Communicating effectively is much easier when the messages are short and simple.
- Focus on the most important aspects.
Keep it Relevant to Your Target Audience
- Consider your target market and audience when developing the website.
- Who is the most critical audience for your company and website?
- The website should be designed and developed so that it can communicate specifically with these visitors.
- Additional efforts can be taken to communicate with other audiences as well, but
Make the Message Impossible to Miss
- The most effective way to ensure that visitors receive the most important messages of a website is by making it very obvious
- Large text, colour text or some other design technique to make the message stand out are common.
- Other techniques include automatically loading audio, video and pop-ups, each of which brings its own usability issues and concerns.
- Visual cues e.g. highlighted text
Use Headers and Sub-Headers
- On pages that consist of a significant amount of text, breaking it up and identifying the main points with headers and sub-headers can be very effective.
- Headers not only help to make the text more readable by creating white space and using bold font to add variety to the page
- Also communicate a structure of the content to visitors and can summarize the primary messages of the content.
Goals for Communication When Developing a Website
- As you’re designing and developing websites, here are some goals to keep in mind that should help you stay focused on creating ones that communicate effectively.
- Clarity: clear message
- Communication that Truly Helps the Business and Visitors
- Consistency of Message
- Design that Enhances the Message: appearance should compliment
- Communication that Relates to the Target Audience e.g. search box words = ‘what music do u like?
- Use of Website Structure to Build on Communication
Results of Good Communication
- Visitors understand the Purpose of a Website
- Improved Branding
- Reduced Bounce Rates
- Less Frustration for Visitors
- More Sales, Leads, Subscribers, etc.
- Less Unnecessary Inquiries
