8 Steps For Website Designing
- Defining the site’s purpose and strategy
Every company or business has its purposes either it’s B2B or B2C, with its own Unique Selling point (USP), and for designing a website, knowing the USP and purpose is very necessary and how you want to come across. As your website would be the face of your brand, it must come across as authentic and engaging.
So the very first step is to know your purpose and once cleared with it the focus shifts to the visitor’s action plan you wanted them to take while landing on your website. Whether you want to inform people about something or you want them to buy your products. In short, what type of websites you want to create matters a lot.
- Latest web design trends research
Web design is very important for your brand as 48% of people consider website design as the most important factor and what is important to understand is what is trending and is not necessarily suitable for you. Every industry has its requirements and fitting into them is very important.
- Choose your platform
Various paid web design agencies work professionally and various DIY online tools let the website owners design their websites by themselves and learning to code is not needed. WordPress, Weebly, Squarespace are some good website builders with various templates that can be helpful to you.
- Template or theme selection
When you are sorting with purpose and web design and platform, finalizing the templates is next in the queue. Templates define the appearance of your website. Some platforms come offering templates. Templates are available in categories as per the industry what designers need to do is to find the relevant that suits them best for you.
- Decide on your branding
This step includes the color scheme, font style, and imagery that reflects the purpose of your website. Color Matters revealed that a signature color can boost brand recognition by 80% and is one of the brand’s biggest tools. Font style affects the visitor’s thinking about the websites as on average 20% of the text is read on a given page by the average website user.
- Add in and content optimization
Positioning and optimizing are two major things to be considered for the next step. Where positioning refers to where the content would sit on each page, meanwhile optimization relates to the content tweaking process to help it at a higher rank on search engines. Commonly website content is positioned in ‘F’ format and that is why the navigation bars are always displayed at the top of the pages and optimization refers to the Search Engine Optimization where the quality and quantity of the content are considered. Metadata is about page titles and descriptions that let google cite your content as it appears in the search results and gives users highlights about your webpage before actually surfing on the webpage. Image compression is another thing to be considered as it attracts users to the webpage and if the image is too large, it will slow down the loading process that would irritate the visitor. Internal linking, mobile responsiveness, etc are the other factors that need attention before the irrevocable steps.
- Publish your website
After following all the steps from establishing the purpose of the website to creating a website with optimized cost time it checks if things are as a plan or not and this requires testing of the website where the website would be a preview on the various devices. The preview section means checking if all internal links are working or not and redirecting the users to the concern page if the content is readable and easy to find, etc.
- Analyze and improve
After the preview, your website is ready to go live, launch it, and check the performance and analysis of the page views, time spent, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc.
Key Components of Effective Web Design
A solid, well-executed web design works as the heart of marketing efforts that has the power to achieve your organizational goals.
The components for the web design are:
- Great user experience
While designing the websites, the visitors or customers must be at the forefront of your mind and what they like is to be navigated easily, which resulted in encouragement of user engagement and interaction influencing the performance of your website. If the website is user-friendly, it will get into the Google algorithm and would rank better otherwise if the bouncing rate is more, then the website’s rank will suffer.
Some elements of page layout are:
- Home page with clear site navigation
- Site search option
- Form entry
- An aesthetically pleasing design
- Mobile responsive
At this time, when even a kid is having their smartphones, it becomes extremely necessary for you to make your website for every type of device user.
- Built for SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the biggest key factor that influences the success of any business online and to stand out in the competition, the pages of the website must be optimized. The websites that are SEO friendly crawl easily across the site that making your content easily available for the viewers.
- Speed
Your website should load should not be too long as it would irritate the visitor. Out of frustration, they might close the website without actually going to your content quality and never come back. The ideal load time for the website should not be exceeded by 3-4 seconds and if exceeds the bounce rate, up to 40% can be expected and this is an enormous no. of losing a potential client. So avoid fancy flash items, music, and large field videos as they exceed the website loading time.
- Compelling Content
What holds visitors more to your website is your compelling content, after all, this is what they are seeking and the study suggests that 38% of people leave the website because of the unappealing content. Having quality content is very vital, as this would frame your image in the industry as a trusted established expert directly contributing to your image branding. Through content, visitors learn more about your company and ultimately convert into customers.
- Calls-to-action
This embedment would add your website more user-friendliness and convert visitors into customers. In general, calls to action means permitting people to take the next step on the respective website. Buttons such as, add to cart, buy now, share with other platforms, sign up, etc are the way to call to action.
- Aesthetically pleasing imagery
It is related to the image display on your website, which is a big part of the web design that makes it easier for the users to run on the website. The basic thing about this that needs to be considered is the quality, appropriate imagery that tells the story of your business affects the visitors more. This helps in website crawling as well.
