Website Design and development
Designing an Attractive Website
In the present era of Internet all companies need to consider and evaluate e-marketing and e-purchasing opportunities. A key challenge is designing a site that is attractive on first viewing and interesting enough to encourage repeat visits.
Rayport and Jaworski have proposed that effective web sites feature seven design elements that they call the 7 C's.
- Context - Layout and design.
- Content - Text, pictures, sound and video the site contains.
- Community - How the site enables user- to - user communication.
- Customization - Site's ability to tailor itself to different users or to allow users to personalize the site.
- Communication - How the site enables site -to- user, user -to- site, or two way communications.
- Connection - Degree that the site is linked to other sites.
- Commerce - Site's capabilities to enable commercial transactions.
To encourage repeat visits, companies need to pay special attention to context and content factors and also embrace another 'C' -constant change. Visitors will judge a site's performance on its ease of use and its physical attractiveness.
Ease of use breaks down into three attributes.
- The website downloads quickly.
- The home page is easy to understand.
- The visitor finds it easy to navigate to other pages that open quickly.
Physical attractiveness is determined by following factors.
- The individual pages are clean looking and not overly crammed with content.
- The typefaces and font sizes are very readable.
- The site makes good use of color and sound.
Context factors facilitate repeat visits, but they do not ensure that this happens. Returning to a site depends on content. The content must be interesting, useful and continuously changing. Certain types of content functions well to attract first-time visitors and to bring them back again.
- Deep information with links to related sites.
- Changing news of interest.
- Changing free offers to visitors.
- Contests and sweepstakes.
- Humor and jokes.
- Games.
Reference: Marketing Management, Philip Kotler, Keller.
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