Things to consider when designing a website

Purpose

Before anything else you must understand your business goals and objectives. Are you designing a website for new customers, existing customers, or both? Are you planning on selling your products, advertising your company or just feel like starting a blog? Once you know the answers to all of these types of questions you can then begin to think about design and content etc.

Design

Design is a fundamental part of a successful website which cannot be overlooked in any way. You can never be too particular and even the small components like text, headings and links share equal responsibility in creating a visually pleasing website.

Good design has the power to evoke trust in your company resulting in increase of demand. A good piece of advice is to never over complicate your website so that it appears to busy. This will only confuse people and possibly turn them away. The design should aid people in effortlessly navigating around the website without them feeling overwhelmed.

Take your company branding into consideration too. Try to compliment your logo by using your brand colours within the website but do not go overboard as this could come across tacky or messy.

Content

Your content is the corner stone of your website and therefore must be of high quality. It is what people are coming to your website for so by providing content that is fresh and regularly updated will bring those customers back again. Make sure to create unique content that is not from other websites as search engines don’t appreciate duplicate content.

Usability

This is a very important element for a well-constructed website. People will expect to navigate around your website with ease and if they do not feel like they are being provided with a user friendly experience they aren’t going to stick around for long.

Not sure if your site is user friendly? Ask yourself these questions:

• Does your site contain web safe fonts?
• Does your site work accurately in all browsers?
• Is the navigation bar in an appropriate position with clear page titles?
• Have you arranged the content so that people can easily access information?
• Have you used images that are web optimised?
• Have you used words that people will understand?
• Is content consistent throughout your website to avoid confusion?

SEO­

If you want your website to be visible to search engines and easily found by your customers then Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is vital.

Search engine optimisation comes in two practises, on-page and off page. They are essential for a website to rank well in organic search results produced by search engines.

On-page SEO is the practise of inserting your chosen keywords in the ideal places on your web pages. On-page SEO involves strategically altering page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve your websites ranking in search engines.

Off-page SEO is the process of promoting your website without making alterations to the website itself. Getting more inbound links, registering with appropriate directories, and getting search engines to index more pages are examples of Off-Page SEO.
If you’d like some help designing your website please email us or call us on 01992 536 223.