In a world driven by technology, it has become essential for every business whether it is a local business or a global business to create an online presence. And to create an online presence you need to design websites where people can find complete information about your business, can contact you, order from your website if you sell online. Having a proper website design helps you boost your local SEO and advertising campaigns, take complete control of your brand image online, and also build long term relationships with your customers. But, every website out there cannot help you do that. You need to have well-designed websites to deliver the results you want.
In this article, we will discuss how to design websites. What should be the important elements, and functions which would help you design websites for success?
Things to Consider Before Designing a Website
Below are the few very important things which you should consider before you start to design your website.
User Behavior
The first thing you should take into consideration before you start to design websites is your customer’s online behavior.
Your website is there to guide your existing customers and potential customers towards a specific action.
Though, that action needs to address a specific need of the customer.
The better you understand the behavior of your customers, the better you will be at addressing their needs.
For instance, if your website is about a restaurant, your users may want to book their tables for having lunch, breakfast, or dinner at your place, or they would order food online from your restaurant.
Simply, putting your customers would want to check the food menu, seat availability, offers you are offering, etc.
In this case, your design website templates should show the food menu, pictures of the food items, layout of your restaurant, operating hours, offers, contact details, and the “Book Now” button on your website should allow the customers to make table reservations in your restaurant.
And if you accept online food orders then the “Order Now” button should accept the customer’s order.
Quality & Credibility
Quality and Credibility are the main factors that make people trust a business. With that trust only they want to establish a relationship or transact with your business.
In the online world, website users appreciate quality and credibility on a website.
You can have the most beautiful design websites in the world.
But if your content is lacking in quality and credibility, your design websites mean nothing.
And you will keep struggling to get the results you want from your website.
So, create the best quality content, images, and videos.
Also, cite credible resources for information so that your website visitors can trust your business.
Also, encourage your existing customers to share their feedback about their experiences with your business.
This will help new visitors on your website get that social proof which would make them trust your business.
Analyzing Your Webpages
Users scan web-pages.
Remember that they don’t read every single bit of content and search for anchors to guide them through the content of your website page.
So, make your website in such a manner that the most important information and CTA (call-to-action) is clearly visible.
Put everything together to encourage the visitor to take the intended action on the page.
Attractive & Attention-Grabbing
Your website needs to grab your visitor’s attention in the first few seconds or you would be risking an exit.
If your visitors leave your website in very few seconds of their visit, this simply means that they couldn’t find what they were looking for on your website.
And if this happens it means your website is not attractive enough, doesn’t have content and elements to grab your user’s attention.
In such cases, you need to rethink the entire website structure and work on fixing things to grab your visitor’s attention so that you can encourage them to take that action on your website which you want them to actually take.
Intuitive
Users tend to follow their intuition which makes it very important that your website structure follows an intuitive flow.
They shouldn’t get confused while on your website thinking about what should be their next action on your website.
If you design your website for intuitive flow you will see that your customer stays on your website for a longer time, and they make the necessary actions you want them to take on your website.
These are some of the basics which should be kept in mind while designing a website for getting the results you want.
Now we will take a look at the basic principles on which the websites are designed, and since you also want to design a website having these considered already would make your website give your results you want.
Principles of Effective Website Design
Applying these principles during your web design process will help you design the website which is attractive, intuitive, informative, user-friendly, web-friendly, and transactional.
Build to Accomplish a Goal
Each page on your website needs to cater to a specific goal of your user.
Whether your user is looking for your contact details or more information on a product or service, your website needs to cater to that in the most effective way.
Communicative
Users tend to consume information very quickly on the internet. Or you can say that they skim through your content very quickly.
Hence, it is very important that you communicate information very clearly on your website. It needs to be easy to read and digest.
You can accomplish this by formatting your text with headers, images, bullet points, italicized or underlined text, etc.
Color Scheme
You should use colors effectively throughout your website.
Your website’s color theme should be complementary and it should create harmony and balance of every element on the website.
For instance, you can provide contrast colors for the text and background to make your content easy to read.
If your website has light-colored pictures you can use them on a dark background to make them stand out. Colors have the power to evoke emotions, so bear this in mind when deciding which color palette to use for your website.
Balance of Text & Media
Text is not the only thing that your visitors see on your website, but there are other elements as well like images, videos, typography, etc., which make their experience better on your website.
Adding relevant infographics and images can communicate a point across to your visitors more effectively than any piece of text.
But, there should be the right balance of the elements.
For instance, if your website has too many images that are not relevant to the content then there is no point users would want to consume your content.
Navigation & User Journey
This refers to the actions the user takes when moving around on your website.
There is a general “3 click rule” which states that it should not take more than 3 clicks for the users to get to their goal/destination.
Make sure that your website has a logical page structure, meaningful content, correct CTA, and navigation which has intuitive user flow.
User Attention Tracking
Studies have shown that users scan computers in an “F” pattern which places their attention first of all on the top left-hand side of the screen.
Hence, you should design your website using this flow instead of forcing a different type of flow.
Prioritize the most important information left to right and top to bottom so that your users quickly get the information they want on your webpage.
Website Load Time
People don’t want to wait too long for the websites to load so that they can get the information they seek.
Rather they exit the websites which are slow in loading and move on to the fast loading website.
Slow-loading websites also badly affect search engine rankings.
Mostly, the images, CSS, Java Scripts, etc., are the elements that make them slow, but they are important elements of the website.
Hence, you should make sure that website images are optimized to load faster, the code is optimized, and other elements are well placed to ensure fast loading of your website.
You can check your website’s loading speed here.
Mobile Friendly
More than half of the searches on the internet are done from mobile devices. Hence, it is important to make sure that your website is optimized to be viewed across all devices.
If your website is not optimized for mobile viewing you will be missing out on a big chunk of traffic, and obviously a big loss in conversions.
Scalable
Your website should be scalable in case you need to add more features, products, pages, elements, images, videos, etc., without compromising the performance.
Hence, make sure that your website is scalable as and when required. Make sure your website grow alongside your business.
Website Security
A lot of people out there are looking for opportunities to hack into your website and steal crucial information from it.
Hence, it is very important that your website is safe for your users, and their personal and financial information on your website is safe. Use the recommended SSL security on your website.
Design & Development Process of Websites
The process of designing a website begins with planning.
Here you plan everything right from the logo, layout, menu, navigation, coding language, server, host, domain, content, images, etc.
The best way is to make your website’s wireframe on paper so that you have a better idea about how your website would look like and while coding it, you won’t miss out on any part of it.
Website Template Framework
While in the development phase, the first thing you should do is to develop the main template for the website.
After that, you can develop the template for individual pages.
Your main template is the foundation for the various page templates as they will inherit a few elements like header and footer from the main template.
Page Templates
Once the master template is developed, the individual page templates are created.
For example, the product page template which will be used for all product pages, contact page template, log in and registration pages, lead capture pages, etc.
Make sure while you design websites for your business you have everything well-planned and executed.
Add Special Features
Special features are developed when the need arises for a specific function; for example, adding social network buttons where users can “like & share” your product or blog posts.
You may also want to add a review widget so that the user can write reviews about the products and services they buy from your website.
Upload Content
Upload the content and other related elements on the specific pages of your website where that content is required.
Make sure there is no error while uploading content on the website pages. If there are few it will return an error when users would visit those pages.
Which is bad for your business and credibility, because that user will lose interest in your website.
Quality Assurance
Once the website has been fully developed, it needs to go through Quality Assurance by testing all links, functionality, navigation, checkout process, etc.
This process can be time-consuming but is necessary in order to avoid any errors when going live.
Check everything right from the links to, product images, descriptions, titles, alt-tags, checkout cart, email triggers to users for their actions like registration, purchase, cancellation, etc., so that when you go live everything is working perfectly and your visitors have a great experience while on your website.
Beta Launch Your Website
When you have checked and tested everything on the website, it’s time to make your website live for the users.
A good idea is to launch the website in beta, so that if your website has any problem users understand that the website is still into the improvement phase.
Keep Testing
Post-launch keep testing your website for bugs, traffic load capacity, user experience, broken links, etc. so that everything works fine.
Maintenance of Website
As the design and development of the website, the maintenance of the website is also important.
Below are a few important things regarding the website design and maintenance which you should keep into consideration.
Security Updates
Keep checking your website for security updates.
If you find anything which is unusual fix it as quickly as possible. Also, take note of the user feedback and complaints if any in regard to your website and resolve it quickly.
Website Backup
It’s a nightmare if you lose your website data.
And it happens when you are not prepared. Hence, make sure that you keep the latest backup of your website either locally or on the server.
By doing this you will never lose your website data.
In case anything goes wrong you have the latest backup of your website to get it back online very quickly.
It should be part of your website design planning.
Content Updates
Content is the reason people would visit your website. Hence, make sure that your content is updated regularly on your website.
Even the websites which keep their content updated on a regular basis have better search engine rankings than the websites which have un-updated content or their frequency of update is very long.
Conclusion
Whether you are designing your first website or redesigning your old website, make sure that you apply best practices and always keep your users on top of your mind.
What will they like? What is their journey? How better you can meet their needs?
In fact, your website is an extension of your business. It should receive the same attention as your physical store does. Do a good job to design websites and get the results you want from your website.
