Your online presence must always be carefully planned and executed. As a web developer, you should be able to design platforms that are going to represent a brand.
A website is a powerful tool that’ll likely make or break your business' success. Hence, ask yourself this question, ‘is my website's design optimized to yield the highest possible return on investment for my business?’
Web designing isn’t merely about sprucing up your website's look to make it appear modern. Even though that’s important, as it affects a client's perception of your business, it still falls a lot further down in the priority list for an informed web developer. If you’re not sure you’ll get the important elements right, it's a good idea to approach a web development services company with a plan for your web design.
As you begin planning for your website design, here are few things that you shouldn’t forget:
Make The Design Human-Centred
Every part of your design should be made with the end-user in mind. As much as you like for your site to have certain functions, always make sure that your preference isn’t merely rooted in your personal taste.
The best healthy food delivery services by Anton Mikhaltsov
Thinking of the end user's experience on your site will help you start off with the right lens, allowing you to look at everything else in your website's development.
Clarify Your Goals
Now that you know how you’re supposed to judge the goodness or badness of your site's design, you might now move to goal clarification.
What’s your business' primary goal at the moment? In what ways do you expect the website will serve those goals? How can the website's design be fully optimized to lead a potential client towards performing your action of choice?
Clarifying your goals is very important, which is why you shouldn't jump straight into designing your site before you’re clear on the goals you’re trying to achieve.
Some people get excited pretty early and hop straight to choosing a beautiful theme aimed at dazzling site visitors, but if that theme isn’t serving a function, it might contradict your overall mission. Everything from colors, button placements, overall design, and so on should be based on your business' purpose.
Prepare Your Image Library
As you’re preparing for seemingly more important things about your website, don’t forget to consider the website's image library.
If you have an in-house web designer, this is a problem you might hardly encounter. But if you hired a developer, then it’s more likely that the image library will only last you so long. After that, you could find yourself recycling images from other pages for your new content.
To avoid this, ensure that during the web design stage, a sufficiently large library is developed, and the images are optimized and ready for future use.
Email Notifications For Your Clients
This is another area that might be left for the very last minute. When a client fills out a contact form or makes an order through your site, there should be an email that goes to them to confirm the action they just performed. Write that email's template in advance and have it signed.
A client might still be forming an impression about your brand, and a good email copy might help the process. Plus, it just makes the user journey smoother after they perform an action as they can be sure their information and orders have been received.
Make Sure The Content Is Search Engine Optimized
Don't forget to include your search engine optimization (SEO) specialist early enough in your website's design.
Clients won’t miraculously bump into your website in their numbers on the internet. Such traffic is usually the result of a deliberate and careful plan that's incorporated in the website's design.
As a start, ensure your content contains keywords that are likely to be used by your target market when searching for your product or service. Figuring these keywords out shouldn't be random as well.
Research into the keywords. How are clients searching for the kind of products that you have on offer? What keywords are your competitors using or not using in their campaigns? All of these can help you come up with a list of keywords for your website and business.
While you’re thinking about content, you might also do well to consider image quality and word count for your pages' content. Don't overwhelm your visitors with too much content on one page. An overwhelmed visitor might get put off before they have even delved into the good stuff you have to say and offer. Since your intention is to communicate with the reader, know that attention spans generally aren't that long, especially when a visitor is new to your site. So, make the best impression you can in as few words as possible.
Test Your Site
Your developer already said they would do this for you, which is great, but after they’ve done so, you still need to do the testing yourself. It might seem redundant and tedious, but it's necessary. You can't have gone through the whole process of website planning and designing only to fail at this last minute. Thus, before you consider the job done, test all its functions.
Digital Library: Art and Design Web App by Anton Mikhaltsov
A part of testing includes checking if the links aren’t broken (a broken link can be discouraging for a visitor who has the intention to browse through your site) and if pages are organized in the correct order.
Additionally, the best functionality imagines all the visitor personas that are likely to visit the page, then uses those personas as a starting point for the testing. Pretend you’re a site visitor that fits a specific profile. Would you be able to smoothly navigate the site or a few things need to be simplified? Yes? Then, it's a good thing you tested for this. Otherwise, you would’ve unnecessarily lost clients in the future.
Takeaway: Get The Best Out Of Your Website
Your website is supposed to help your business achieve its goals, which is why it’s one of the most important tools you have at your disposal.
Make sure you leave nothing behind as you design your website. Check for the things mentioned in this article and anything else that can help you yield optimal results for your business.
Comments