The content for your Web site is written and laid out. Now what?

It’s important, now, to create a site that appeals to your visitors with meaningful, dazzling visual impact. This is accomplished easily, with content-appropriate graphics. Done well, the visual impact will draw in your readers, and hold their interest—long enough for them to read your message, and want to learn more.

First, identify what your business, service, or offering is trying to convey. Who is your target audience? Do you want to portray stable and secure, or modern and cutting edge? Professional and corporate, or fun and lively? Intended for children or teens, or for senior citizens?

Next, decide what colors you want to base your design on, and limit the color family to three or four. Choose colors, designs, and images that portray who you are, and who you want to appeal to. For instance, a children’s site might be visually enhanced with primary colors and geometrical shapes. A real estate consulting service may be done in more subdued colors, and portray images of business-attired professionals poring over blueprints. In general, consider the emotions and impressions that you want to leave your reader with—and which colors evoke them (for instance, red = passion or danger; yellow = happiness, summer, and lightness; green = young, the environment, spring. For more information, check out http://www.infoplease.com/spot/colors1.html.

As you begin to add your graphical enhancements, start with your landing page heading. As the adage goes, a book IS often judged by its cover. So it is with your Web page. In this age of information glut and split-second surfing, your site has to catch a reader’s eye—quickly. If possible, and for best results, use a graphics software such as Adobe PhotoShop or Fireworks (http://www.adobe.com).

Finally, take the extra step and ensure your Web pages are reader friendly. Compress your graphics, to speed up the loading time. Web graphics are usually 72 dpi resolution, and most commonly in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format for easy compressing by Web browsers.

Once you’ve finished laying out your landing page, move to your internal pages. Tie your pages together with repeating and associated designs and colors that help to convey your message, tell your story, and keep your reader interested and informed. A well-planned and laid out Web site, with copy and graphics that complement each other, will not only serve you well—it will be a pleasure to visit!

As you start to put your chunks, headings, and subheads together into a cohesive flow, remember these four key points:

1. Web writing is best laid out in an inverted pyramid style. This is accomplished by starting with your conclusion or main point, and ending with the finer points and details of your topic.
2. A successful site is written for many different levels of interest. It’s a tough concept, but the best sites are written from the viewpoints of “there is no interest in my topic,” to “my reader is thirsting for more info.” How do we do this?
3. Avoid promotional, boastful, or subjective writing, or exaggerated claims
4. Keep your paragraphs concise. What’s more, using high quality graphics will help get your key points across quickly, and without belaboring the point with unnecessary text.

As you plan your site, remember: less is more. Plan your page layout so the reader doesn’t have to scroll far down the page. You can accomplish this by presenting one idea per paragraph, ensuring your salient points tell the story succinctly and effectively. If it’s necessary to have a fair amount of information on one page so that scrolling is unavoidable, try to:

• Provide a strong, cohesive flow for scrolling pages
• Provide links back to top if long scrolling (over 1.5/2 scrolls)

Lastly—and perhaps the biggest point to remember as you plan your site—provide all your information within three clicks from the landing page. Usability studies show that if a reader is required to drill down any more than three clicks, you may lose their interest. When your information does require the user to click to another area, use a one-sentence summary for the link. Note: longer links give more info, so it’s fine to create them using:

• associated text as clues
• trigger words to describe content
• different links to same content

Do try to avoid adding excessive links, however, as too much colored, underlined text can be distracting to your readers.

Above all, remember: we only have a few seconds to influence the reader. Make those seconds count!v