Interactive Design

Ultimately it is the user's experience on your website that will determine whether or not your site meets your organization's goals.  It is critical that the design of your site keeps the needs of your visitors in mind as well as the needs of the organization. 

Every organization has a message. Our job is to make sure that message is clearly and effectively communicated on the Web. In order to craft the online messaging, we ask three distinct questions:

• Who is the target audience? 
• What do they want and need to know and already believe about your organization?  
• And most importantly, what do you want them to know and do when they come to your site?

Creative Design and Information Architecture

Information architecture and creative design go hand in hand. It's another example of how NetStrategies combines marketing and technology to deliver online marketing results for associations. To inform the design and identify the key content for each audience, we look at:

• Site Messaging and how the organization desires to be perceived.
• Target audience identification and prioritization based on how they relate to the goals of the organization. 

Simply put, information architecture (IA) is the structure of the information on the site. IA is not a basic organization of content. Effective IA is driven by how the primary site audiences expect to access the information and what you want those people to do on the site. In this stage, we review what you plan to publish and determine the best way to organize it so that site visitors can quickly and easily find the information they seek. IA is defined in a diagram showing the site navigation and content groups.

Good creative design must be both attractive and functional. Attractive design reinforces association branding and appeals to the target audience. A key aspect of functional design is using layout, format, color, images, and overall design to emphasize and highlight the online actions defined as the value-based goals of the association. 

Technical Design

Site technology is the backbone of design. The site must work properly in order to accomplish online marketing goals. Technical requirements are developed with particular attention to each association's member management database and other internal software. NetStrategies has extensive integration experience and can provide seamless operations between the member management database, other internal software, the content management system, and the appropriate web tools, including site search and web analytics.