Cohesiveness

After all the elements of your site is in place, take a good hard look at it, and ask yourself if everything

coordinates together, and if all of the elements present a single, targeted message.

Cohesiveness is another thing that is sort of hard to define, but you know it when you see it. And it is

absolutely essential to creating a site that is professional and which serves it's purpose to the fullest.

When someone comes into your site, they will usually not notice the design overmuch, nor will they even give a

thought to efficient navigation or good text, unless it annoys them, or happens to engender a strong positive

feeling. Usually though, great design ends up feeling neutral and invisible to the site visitor. This means it is

familiar to them, expected, and transparent. It becomes like going to Wal-Mart – they don't think about the floor

tiles and the produce arrangement, it just IS, and they can find what they want, so they leave happy.

If something is not quite right about the site though, perhaps a color does not blend as it should, or a

graphic sends a confusing message, or the navigation takes too long to figure out, then they'll feel

uncomfortable just long enough to feel cautious about trusting you. Sometimes they cannot even

pinpoint WHAT makes them feel that way, or even that they DO feel that way. They just know they feel

like they did not find QUITE what they were looking for, so they go find it somewhere else. Such

decisions are most often made in the subconscious, without the visitor even being fully aware of how or

why they were made. Aware or not though, they'll leave, and you'll lose the sale.

Every element in your site matters: Writing, graphics, design style, layout, site organization, formatting, link

names, etc, all needs to have the same kind of feel – warm, professional, academic, casual, formal, childlike,

gentle, firm, fun, humorous, lighthearted, whatever. And the feel needs to be in harmony with your business type,

your manner of doing business, and your primary marketing messages.

A site should also have a design theme that is consistent and coordinated throughout the entire site.

Sometimes when you combine a shopping cart with info pages, it can be extremely difficult to match the designs

exactly between two systems, but it is always possible to coordinate them using the same colors, similar design

elements, matching fonts, and a similar layout that shares ease of use features. People don't mind differences

from page to page, as long as the items they need to find can be found in approximately the same place, and as

long as it is completely apparent that they are still on the same site. The two areas should also send a unified

marketing message.

With virtually every site we have designed, we have worked through a design process, which involved testing

colors, different header looks, different graphic accents, page accents and text formatting. Typically it looks “ok”,

for a long time, getting better and better, until we finally make one final tweak, which makes us go, “Yeah!”.