5 Crucial Tips for Designing and Maintaining a Large Site

Your website is the face of your company in the virtual world and that is why you should ensure that you put your best foot forward while designing it. The different sites vary to a great extent on the basis of shape and size and how you handle it. A web designer faces a lot of trouble while designing any site especially the larger ones.  They have to handle the domain where there will be thousands of active members chatting constantly, uploading and buying. These sites process a large amount of money as well as data.

Creating, designing, redesigning and maintaining the large sites come with their own set of challenges. That is why here are some points that will help to make life easier for you. Just read on.

• Keep the Homepage free of Clutter – It is a sad truth that we hardly read every word of a website. Instead we can scan the pages, picking out keywords and sentences. With these things in mind, it is always advisable to appeal to the emotions rather than the number of words. The less someone has to read, click or remember, the more they will understand what is going on in front of them. This actually makes it easier for them to do what need to be done. Call to actions and texts are vital but make sure you break them up in broad subheads and paragraphs.  You can also suggest images or icons to communicate the point.
• Design for Easier Maintainability – One of the first things to keep in mind while designing a large site is to design it in a way that is very simple to maintain. Many-a-times while designing a site you may sacrifice a number of things for the aesthetics of the site. For example, you can go for images where styles would have been sufficient. Or you may also go for a menu structure that has no place to grow. These are bad ideas when the site is large.
• Identify the User Groups and Tasks – The biggest difference between a large and a small site is the number of different users who may be using the site. Let’s take for example FlashDen. There are authors, buyers, visitors, admins as well as members. Each group has a different set of tasks and aims that are required to be executed.  At times, they are different and at times they overlap. When you know the different groups, you can design a site that solves all their requirements. On the other pages you may even have subsets. The homepage consists of the most vital designing part that you need to conduct. You have to prioritise the groups on the basis of what the site is trying to achieve.
• Understand the Goals of the Site –Although every group of users think that they happen to be the most important ones, it is upto you to prioritise the different groups on the basis of what the site is trying to achieve. Understanding the purpose of the site is the final indicator of what should be put on the page. Ideally you should identify the tasks, user groups and the priorities. You can do it on paper for vital pages like homepages and for the others you can just do it on your head.
• Design and Refine – It is the time to design only when you have a clear idea about the tasks, groups, priorities and site goals and various other things related to the site. Once you have known how the information can work together, you can come up with a design that is generally ok. After that, all you have to do is just keep refining the design several times for achieving perfection.  You can try refining the different things like images, sizes, layout alterations, backgrounds and so on to see how the information you are presenting is affecting the site.

The above are some of the crucial things that you need to keep in mind at the time of designing and maintaining large sites as suggested by the reputed digital agency in London where the team has apt knowledge and experience in this regard as they are working in this domain since many years now.