Minisite Design – Is It Really Easy to Find an Expert Professional

It won’t be much of trouble to find out a graphic designer having excellent command over use of colours and web designing. However, you will face a challenge while spotting a designer who can aptly deliver a winning style for your minisite design. A website or its mini version is actually a sales site.

If you search on Google for a website designer, millions of results will appear in just 0.12 seconds. However, only a few of them are equipped with knowledge of advanced online sales techniques. In fact, the companies are also not aware of such techniques and always in a hunt for a graphic designer who can develop a website with spectacular graphics and animated effects.

Must-Have Qualities of Expert Minisite Designers

A minisite is actually a sales page for any business. Only good look and comfortable navigation of a minisite are not going to work for your business. You need something more and that ‘X’ factor could be achieved only if you hire an expert designer having good amount of knowledge about marketing. An inevitable question arises and it is about the requisite qualities of a minisite designer. Let’s learn what qualities you must look into a web designer before getting someone to work.

There is no doubt that all minisites have converging purpose – making more profit. Still, primary goal is not same for all. Most of the minisites adopt direct approach of online selling while the rest collect online visitors’ database on their page. Some redirect the visitors to their main website whereas others offer membership proposal. You can notice sea changes in design of minisites just because they serve to different primary purposes of their owners.

The first and most important quality of an expert website designer is he must have clear and in-depth understanding of his client’s business and the purpose behind his minisite making. Depending on the purpose, the designer will choose the right set of images that are highly relevant to your business.

Knowing the target audience is important not only for you but also for your designer. The approach towards a minisite design that will sell Forex product will have ‘hell and heaven’ difference from the one selling cosmetic products. Visitors’ profile at an education site will be way different from that on a minisite designed for online dating. Apart from layout style, there will be huge difference in use of colours and graphics selection too.

Sharp yet soothing colour contrast attracts the visitors. An expert designer has great sense about colour use and contrast making. Catchy headlines should feature bright colour effects though use of too many colours at a particular section is very much distracting. Font types and text sizes should be such that the minisite content offers better readability. Titles and subtitles should appear in bigger texts as compared to the following paragraphs.  

It is better if the designer highlights certain sections or words and use bulleted points, underline, strikethrough where necessary. In a word, a good minisite designer should take into consideration all those points that contribute to converting a site into an effective sales page. 

Minisite Design – Some Mistakes You Must Avoid

As soon as the importance of good minisite design sinks in, the entrepreneurs are almost rushing through the process of having one of their own. However, while doing so in hurry, the webmasters or website proprietors often end up making some common mistakes. Here those are for you to learn and avoid :

Going without a plan:

It tops the list of mistakes when you don’t have any plan in regards to minisite structure and design including navigation and links. 

No keyword research: 

The priority of online marketing is to top the result pages in the search engines and a way to do that is to optimize your minisite on the basis of a set of keywords. In any minisite structure, keywords work like pillars. If this important step is missed, the entire structure will collapse. Never choose a keyword that nobody searches, otherwise your web business will fail. Focus on those keywords that are frequently searched and attract leads to your website. Use Goodkeywork, Wordtracker or Google keyword suggestion tool for this purpose.

Too much loading time for minisite: 

If it takes more time to load, the visitors will lose their patience. We are living in an age when nobody is ready to wait for long. If it takes less time to load and navigation between pages is simple and quick, the visitors will be happy to hit the button. 

Stuffing of minisite layout: 

Make sure not to clutter your minisite design. There should not be too much of graphics, flash animation, images and any other type of bells and whistles. Those will be fine to attract the children in kindergarten but are never a good idea to engage traffic and mint money. The use of flash animations, JavaScirpts and graphics should be limited. The search engines like keywords, keyphrases and quality of content. So, don’t waste your time on catchy images. Despite their relevance, they won’t be valued by Google. 

Heavy dependence on WYSIWYG HTML editors: 

 Don’t be too much dependent on Mozilla Firefox, Frontpage or any other WYSIWYG HTML editor. If you use them, you could have your minisite designed at one side of the screen instead of get it positioned at the center. Positioning is important as wrong alignment will mar the purpose of even a decently designed and perfectly keyword-optimized minisite. 

Exceeding 750 pixels: 

Limit your use of pixels to 750. Going beyond that is not prohibited but the visitors never like scrolling from side to side. Alternatively, you can use percentage of screen and not pixels. However, take care that it is not narrowed down to less than 650 pixels. 

No knowledge of color choice and harmony: 

Have you considered emotion of colors while developing your minisite design? If your layout has a dark background, never use dark colors. Even a light color on a heavily dark background won’t work well. Consider using dark colors on a white background, such contrast will offer better readability. Understand how different colors will leave effect on your target visitors. If you want red in your website content, use it with caution and sparingly (for headings and sub-headings). Without exceptional expertise, don’t use black or grey. Maintain a lot of white space as fewer peepers and more salt will give some much-loved relief to the visitors.