So, how can you avoid ending up with an underwhelming website design? And which website tips are most crucial for the success of your site?
Strategy
The first step can often be the hardest… A problem that many people face is not knowing exactly what they want when starting out. They know they need a new website, and they have a vague idea of its purpose, but they haven’t taken the time to map out what they want to display to the world. Therefore, it is imperative to do so before beginning to design your website.
It is important to consider your brand identity, business values and target audience. In order to provide consistency throughout the site, you should be clear about this on every single page. When you aren’t clear on the message you are trying to send to potential customers, they will pick up on this and perceive your website as confusing and chaotic. Whilst this can be tough to do alone, if you are working with a website design agency, they will analyse your brand guidelines and target personas in order to create a strategy which aligns with your mission and values.
Customer Journey
Once you have established the message you want to send, you can begin to consider the customer journey. Creating a list of target personas will help your designer understand what each customer type will be looking for on the website. It is important to map out their journey and ask questions along the way. For example, what is their first impression of the landing page? What are they looking for? Is it easy to find? What content would make them stay on the website for longer…? It is crucial to understand the journey for each customer type in order to optimise the user experience.
Sitemaps
As you are working your way through planning your website, you will need to consider mapping out all the pages you would like to include. It is good practice to start by deciding what the main categories in your top-level menu are going to be. Then, you can begin to think about the different pages that will be included under each section. This is an ideal time to think about user experience and consider if your personas will easily be able to find what they need in the proposed site map.
Wireframes
The next step in the process will be to build the site using wireframes. Wireframes are commonly used to provide the basic structure of a page, before the visual design and content is added. If you are working with a web design agency, your designer may provide you with wireframes in order to get approval of the page structure before the creative phase gets underway.
SEO
SEO should always be integrated when completing a website design project. A website design that considers SEO will draw more traffic due to ranking higher on the SERP (search engine results page). Performing keyword research before the content upload is vital for prompting content and providing title tags and meta-descriptions. Equally, any expert web designer knows that optimising site speed is essential, given that for every extra second a page takes to load, your conversions can drop by up to 20%.
Content
Not only does the content on your page attract people to your site, it also motivates them to stay for longer and interact with your brand more! The content you provide can help your business to stand out from others in the market, as well as establish authority. Now would be a good time to refer back to your target personas and work to provide content they enjoy. It is good practice to use a mixture of content types (written, image and videos) in order to increase engagement.
Analytics
Website analytics can provide invaluable insights and data which can be used to create a better user experience for website visitors. Seeing metrics such as session times, bounce rates and the most popular paths to purchase can help you to understand customer behaviour, and then optimise your website to better suit customer needs. You definitely don’t want to miss out on putting a Google Analytics tag into your website’s code.
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If you would like to discuss your website design requirements, please get in touch. We are an Oxfordshire based web design agency, working with clients all over the country to deliver high impact website design services. Please email info@xist2.com or call 01993 835 117. We would be happy to discuss your needs.
