When you are setting up a website it is important to identify your target audience and make sure that your content and features are geared to that audience and their needs. For many businesses, they will have a very specific target audience(s) that they are writing and designing content for. Here are a few of the different kinds of websites and the different design considerations you would make when developing the site:
School Websites
A school website will be used by students of the school, prospective students, parents, prospective parents, school staff and even education authorities like Ofsted inspectors, for example. Therefore, the content will not be created with one type of audience in mind. In this example, you might create pages that provide the content that each one would be looking at and base your tone on that. You can see this website for more ideas.
Typical features that would be needed are a news feed/blog to relay school announcements/events, a school calendar, an area that is effectively ‘selling’ the school to prospective students/parents. Because social media is so popular with students, it is also a good idea to increase engagement with social media feeds on the website.
Clothes Retailer
Any business that sells items is likely to want to offer online sales and will, therefore, look at e-commerce websites. So the website will need to include an online payment transaction method and also have top security features to ensure hackers cannot steal any card data. A clothes retailer would require a very visual design, incorporating galleries of images of the clothes, with easy search and filtering functionality to make things simple for the online shopper (for example, filtering by size, colour, style etc.) There would also be a requirement to set up an account with the retailer before making a purchase.
Estate Agents
The quality of websites set up by estate agents varies from high tech ones that offer 3D video viewings of properties to ones that look like they are still in the dark ages. The key features that any good estate agents should have include a way to display high quality, professional property images. It should also have an easy to use search functionality to help people locate homes in the area that they are looking at, within the relevant price range. Ideally, they should be able to search for properties using a map view to show exactly where the property is situated plus the necessary filters e.g. price, for rent/for sale etc.
There should also be an easy way for the content managers to add and remove properties and to include all of the essential marketing information about properties. There should be an easy way of contacting the agents, via a form or requesting a callback.
Restaurant Website
A good restaurant website will want to persuade diners that their restaurant is the one to book, by showcasing some very appetising dishes. So the homepage will usually be very visual, including at least one image of the cuisine or the restaurant itself. Further to this, a way of booking a table should be integrated into the website, usually by a third party app like Bookatable or similar.
People like to know what other people think of the restaurant and food, so it is also a good marketing technique for restaurants to show reviews from people who have eaten there before. People also like to find out what dishes the restaurant offers, so it is good practice to display the menu in some way. If there are any specific offers on certain days/times than showing these on the website is also effective marketing.
