Design

Employing the most innovative and creative web and graphics designers, Meta Media promises to cater to your company’s specific design needs. Don’t have a website yet? Simple. Meta Media’s trained designers will craft one catered to your business. We employ only the most intuitive designers, educated and skilled in the arts of design and usability, to ensure that your customers have a pleasing, user-friendly web environment when visiting your site.

Already have a website, but not sure of its effectiveness on consumers? Meta Media will take over, redesign your site, and optimize key usability functions such as navigation, search fields, color, layout, and design scheme. No task is too big or too small for our motivated, skilled designers.

Usability

1. A clear and easy to follow navigation

Visitors need to know where they are, where they’ve been, and where they can go. Meta Media employs navigation systems that are consistent. Your users will see the same options on every page, in the same format. Avoiding visitor confusion with random links, Meta Media’s designers ensure that your users feel comfortable and confident with our consistent navigation. Appropriate internal linking also helps users find exactly what they are looking for. Meta Media uses clear, concise linking so that your visitors know exactly where a link is going to lead them. We also set the link apart in color and format so that users can easily identify linked text. To ensure that the navigation is easy to follow, we include a link to the homepage on every one of your pages, helping to center your visitors and always give them a route back home. Also, we link your site’s logo to the homepage so there are always multiple routes back to the visitor’s starting point. Even with our advanced research and knowledge about clear navigation, we know the importance of putting the control in the hands of the site visitor. That’s why we include a search box in the main navigation, making doubly sure that the user can find exactly the product or service for which he searches.

2. Concise Content

Our content writers here at Meta Media know the importance of clear, concise text. Your site visitors may initially be drawn to our dynamic design, but the text is what keeps the visitor at your site. Meta Media writes first for the user, and second for the Search Engine. In order to keep your visitors’ attention, we ensure that the most important copy is high on the page, within the viewing range of the user. Just as newspapers place the most important stories above the fold, Meta Media places your most important content on the viewable area of the screen, before scroll. Meta Media knows that sometimes visitors will not take the time to read lengthy, detailed content. While we do want to make as much information available to your visitors as possible, we also want the content to read smoothly and lend itself to quick scanning. Bulleted lists and organizational charts are key to keeping the reader’s attention. We emphasize the content also in the context of its design: with bold type, different colors, header tags, etc.

While we do write for the visitor first, we also employ certain writing strategies that appeal to the Search Engine. For example, since Search Engine spiders do not crawl images, we avoid placing any unnecessary text in images. We want your most important terms to get picked up by the Search Engine in order to increase your ranking in natural search; therefore, we emphasize placing top search terms in your titles, image URLs, and in other strategic spots not only on the page content, but also in the page source.

3. Brand Awareness

A strongly branded Web site encourages visitors to remember your company, and return to your site. If visitors see that your brand is consistently present throughout your Web site, they will think of you when they are in the market for your particular product or service. Ensuring proper Web site branding involves a lot of effort and attention to detail, especially in the realm of page layout and design. Here at Meta Media, our expert designers place emphasis on consistency in color, typeface, and page layout. We choose your colors and fonts and apply them across all elements of your site. Our skilled designers will also create a custom template for your Web site, and apply it across all pages, ensuring consistency and proper branding. Key to branding is a catchy, memorable tagline. Meta Media’s creative team will create a clear and concise tagline that sums up your value proposition and also reinforces your brand.

4. Visitor Feedback Form

Since your Web site is targeted at your visitors, we want to give them a chance to tell us how they feel about the site. Including a simple feedback form will allow your visitors to contribute their experience and give us insight into how we can improve the site. Meta Media designs clear forms with easy to use instructions so that the visitor can enter minimal information in order to convey his thoughts. In order to instill a sense of comfort into your visitors, we will display your mailing address or P.O. box in addition to the option of an email form. That way, visitors feel that your company is more accessible should they require further communication.

5. Site Testing and Continual Optimization

Finally, Meta Media’s usability team will employ different test groups to measure the effectiveness of your Web site. Since Meta Media designs your site based on your preferences, our employees, as well as yours, should be able to navigate effortlessly through the site, process the content, and understand the value proposition. It is crucial to see if people outside of the business will be able to enjoy the same level of understanding and comfort with the Web site. Our usability team will create test groups that span different demographics in order to gain user feedback. Usability testing enables us to apply user feedback to the site before it goes live. We can gain insight into several key subjects through usability: