“Design is where science & art break even” – Robin Mathew

Does your website look “professional” and modern enough to represent your brand, products and services effectively? Does it best reflect your core values, your achievements and your devotion to providing good customer service? And does each page help or even hinder visitors and potential customers from understanding “where am I? what can I do here? and why should I do it?

Further, is your site written to be about you and what you offer to your customers. Or is it about what they get and how it will solve their problems, make their lives easier or at least save them time or money? This subtle difference can have a big impact on how people feel about you and your brand. After all your site is more about them, not you. You did make it for them right?

As well as acting as a public store-front and the first point of access for untapped markets, partners or journalists, your website is primarily an online marketing and communications tool that needs to best represent your brand and display all your content and marketing message perfectly – in all mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

Sure, your site needs to be able to display your space brand’s best images and your latest news and press releases in a way that encourages industry commentators to spread your message on the web. But does it work like a well oiled machine that matches the quality of your brand and products? Does it highlight the main benefits of using your company over others in the market? And does it make visitor’s lives easy by providing all the tools they need to help promote your brand for you?

By integrating, image sliders, video or multimedia elements, social sharing buttons, newsletter sign up functionality, twitter feeds, documentation sections and slick design elements that encourage potential customers to make an enquiry or achieve your other goals? If it fails to do this effectively, your brand is likely suffering every single day by missing valuable business and media coverage.

Space Company Web Design Do’s and Don’ts

• Don’t allow your web design agency to create your site on their own propriety content management system – they will charge you to updated it
• Don’t build your website using “website builder” tools. Platforms such as SquareSpace force you to give up ownership of your own content
• Don’t settle for unpersonalized, out-of-the-box layouts and themes, your company is uniqe, your website should reflect this wherever possible
• Don’t build a static html based site that doesn’t allow you to add news, blog posts or image galleries, your business is dynamic, your site should be too
• Don’t try to reinvent the wheel, use standard layouts and content elements that people already know how to navigate and use easily
• Don’t forget to resize photos and images, slow loading pages cause unessessary usability issues and discourage potential customers to revisit
• Don’t over complicate your design elements, sure, include your best product images and slideshows to impress visitors but not overdo it
• Don’t make a brochure site, or use a print designer, websites are functional machines that need to work well to deliver your marketing message

• Do remember to prioritize and map your main goals to elements on the page and include strong call to action messages throughout
• Do stick with a specific color scheme and be sure to choose the color of links different from text and stick with your choices
• Do use nonrestrictive layouts. As time goes on your will accumulate better images and stronger messages that should be easy to update
• Do break paragraphs of over 8 lines up into smaller paragraphs that are easy to read, use subheadings, bullets and graphics for skim readers
• Do make sure every page explains itself, allow visitors to understand where am I, What can I do here and Why should I do it