Web Design, the Malaysia Way

I always believe that a nice WordPress theme should be designed as simple as possible. A WordPress theme is the presentation of content of a Blog. Therefore, I believe the theme should be simple enough in order to make the content stand out, conveying messages across clearly.

Still, simple is the most difficult part of it. A simple theme should also carry their own identity. The following are two WordPress theme designed by Lucian E. Marin. They are simple and nice!

Andrea, most beautiful WordPress theme ever made, inspired by an incredible woman. See the Preview Page. Download Now!

The Journalist, or redefinition of minimalist, is a smart, sophisticated WordPress theme designed for professional journalists. See the Preview Page. Download Now!

If this is a revamp of your current website, I bet you wish to see some improvement. Sadly to say, face lit upgrade has becoming the de facto measurement to the result of the revamp. Key important parameters including number of visitors and conversion rate are not taken into consideration.

Ask website owners around you, most of them do not even have a solid idea of the goal of their website. Make sure your goal is measurable. Number of online order or inquiry are good example of goal.

Ok, now if we have a goal, it would be much easier. If you have 100 visitors a month, and 10 out of them make an online order. That means, you have 10% conversion rate in that particular month. If you are revamping, you should have some figures in mind. Example, you might be looking at 1,000 visitors after the revamp and probably to increase the conversion rate to 20%.

If everything works (no shortcut, lot of hardwork for sure), you will be getting 200 orders a month. If each new sales generates RM10 revenue, that means your monthly revenue would be around RM2,000 a month.

See, it is never hard to estimate a budget. Just make sure you are clear about the purpose of revamp, in a MEASURABLE way!

(Using website to reduce your operation cost is another way to determine your budget, we will talk about this in my next post)

The look and feel of a site should be separated from its content. Imagine if you have to revamp your website, and everything you have done earlier will have to redo again. You lost your competitive high search ranking built over the years because of the filename change, and you are prepared to lose it again in your next revamp which will be taking place in future.

The introduction of WordPress Blog, not being just a world-best Blogging platform, but also smartly define how a website components should work with each other. A theme was used to defined the layout of the website, without any content but only placeholder.

Placeholders are then replaced with content pulling out from a database. This is not something new to Blog, but corporate website will soon be tapping on this.

Started from hand sketch, a web layout was turned into box components. When a more detailed layout was produced, it was reviewed for its usability, technical compatibility, loading speed, extendability and others. Localization to other languages and right-to-left layout was tested. Reviews was done several time until a finalized version of layout was completed.

This is just a start. It would be converted into HTML coding in the web interface stage. This is followed by coding, debugging and finally the launch!

Most of the website owners are able to tell us what they want when come to the design of their websites. Their preferences run wild from font-size to the colors used in the web layout!

We started by asking them who and what is the reason for someone to visit their website. Not everyone, please. Until now, they seem to understand pretty well about their visitors.

They continue to propose features which they want. This is where they stray away from their objective. Sadly to say, it sounds that those features are of what the site owners want, than their visitors.

It comes into a long list, from content management system to online payment. If your customers are businesses who prefer dealing with you by check, or group of people who never buy online - how much would this online payment help!?

The simple rule is, starting from something simplier. Do not worry about what features your customers might want to have, because they are the one who will let you know. The site owner, only represents one of the visitor, not everyone!

If there is only one feature you will need to include in your website, it would be how to make the life of customers easier!

Search options are something that can change from time. In real life, business grow. If today you use a State name (eg, Selangor) to find a housing development project from a Developer’s website, tomorrow you might be sorting your way by country as the developer grows and has more project internationally.

It is an never ending games. Your customers decide what is best to find their way to the information they want from your website. The site owner listens and make changes to their website - But, all this can not be done if your website is build dynamically with a database-driven backend! Why? Because all fields and columns are hardly changed.

Tag or Category present an alternative and better solution to this. Managing Tag is easier, without the need to touch the database. It is parallel, in terms of every item can belong to more than one Tag, yet flexibly enough to be presented in any way you like!

This makes content sorting more logical and practical! Check how 1.com.my sort their content!