Design Your Website for Your Target Audience

Some of the latest web design practices may be sleek and cool-looking, but that doesn’t automatically mean you should implement them. For example, many newer sites now are missing a link in the menu for the Home page, and instead the company logo leads to the Home page.

Why is this? Most likely someone thought it was cool and that people would be able to figure it out, and it caught on. While you and I know to hover over the logo to see if it links to Home, your site’s visitors may not. For this reason, most websites we’ve designed have a link for Home! I would hate for a client to confuse or lose a visitor because they couldn’t navigate back to Home. 

No text below the fold?

Another example: A few years ago it was a major no-no to have all your text below the fold. The thought was that you didn’t want to make people scroll to have to read what you had to say, but this has changed. Now, many sites have a really huge image on the home page, with any text being way at the bottom, and you have to scroll – sometimes a lot – to see it!

But if you feel that your target audience should see this text, then don’t use a huge image! Do what works for you, not what some designer decided looks cool. While many of our sites have tall Home page images, we designed one recently that had a shorter image, so that some important text would be viewable without scrolling.

Bottom line – do what works for you, and always keep your particular audience in mind. Break the so-called “rules” and keep it simple for people to navigate your website.