What to Consider When Designing a Website

Building a Website Requires Planning

A user-friendly website is like building a solid foundation for your business online. There are many things to consider when designing and developing a website. These cover everything from layout and color schemes to typography, fonts, and images. Our main goal here is to highlight how nailing your website design can make or break your online success.

There’s much more to consider than just a catchy domain name and a good website… So, let’s roll up our sleeves and dive into the essential factors to keep in mind when setting off on your website development and design adventure. 

The Target Audience and the Market

The first step is to understand who your audience is, and what makes them tick. Once you do know, you can specifically target them. They feel at home because you have created a website that resonates with them. Take the time to research and identify your customers’ needs, preferences, and expectations.

Do your own market research and take a look at what your competitors are doing. That competitor analysis helps you gain insights into industry trends and best practices. Your website tells a story about you, your business, what you do… and when you nail down who you’re doing it for, your website design process can be very effective.

Consider this:

• Know who your target audience is so you can make sure your website is specifically targeted to their needs. It’s just like getting up close and personal! They’ll feel you designed your website just for them.
• Conduct thorough market research and competitor analysis to stay ahead of industry trends. Successful competitors are doing something right. Find out what their secret sauce is.
• Harness the power of user personas, journeys, and stories to inform your site design decisions.

The Website Structure and Navigation

The job of a web designer is complex… If you want to give website visitors a seamless browsing experience, then you need to start with a clear and logical website structure. You’ll begin your overall design by developing a well-defined sitemap, wireframe, and or prototype.

These are excellent ways to plan and test your website’s layout and functionality. You get to trial-before-you-implement intuitive navigation elements such as menus, breadcrumbs, and buttons to help users navigate your site effortlessly.

Factors to Consider:

• Plan a clear and intuitive website structure to enhance user experience.
• Utilize sitemaps, wireframes, and prototypes to visualize and refine your website’s layout.
• Incorporate user-friendly navigation elements for easy site navigation.

The Website Content and Style

Compelling content and a visually appealing style are key components of effective website design. Focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that engages and informs your audience. Follow best practices for writing and formatting web copy, headlines, and calls to action (CTAs) to capture and retain user attention. Choose colors, fonts, images, and icons that align with your brand identity and convey your message effectively.

More Things to Consider While Designing:

• Create engaging and informative content to keep users interested and informed.
• Craft compelling headlines and calls to action to encourage user interaction. We sometimes call this engagement.
• Choose colors, fonts, images, and icons that reflect your brand identity and message.
• Your website may be built on easily found and accessible (and often free) design software, making it easy for just about anyone with the patience and a little knowhow to create something useful. More and more these days, it’s “website design and development made easy” thanks largely to platforms (which you may have already heard of before) such as Wix, WordPress, Shopify, GoDaddy, Weebly, Blog, SquareSpace and many more.
• If you have products and services to offer, you can design your site using quality design fundamentals using many of these design platforms, some of which could also be your hosting provider.

The Website Performance and Optimization

Optimizing your website is a term you hear more and more these days. It’s because to be seen, and to win the holy grail of being found on the first page of search engine results, you need to plan to provide users with a seamless and enjoyable browsing experience. When they find you, you want not just the nature of your website, but also the design of your website to be so compelling that people on your site want to stay! 

Ensure that your website is fast to load, and is compatible across different devices, gadgets and browsers. This is called responsive design and encompasses many varied elements… that improve website load time and speed, security, and compatibility through various optimization techniques.

For best results you also need to use analytics best practices to implement SEO (and often need to regularly revisit SEO to keep your rank high and business growing). It’s all part of maintaining optimum accessibility, to enhance online visibility and drive conversions. 

Even More Important Things to Consider:

• Local searches are almost all done on a phone. Make sure your web design is optimized to be attractive on mobile devices (and tablets).
• Can your visitors see your contact information on every page?
• Optimize website performance for speed, responsiveness, and compatibility.
• How can your own customers do some social sharing? 
• Implement security measures to protect user data and ensure a safe browsing experience.
• Utilize SEO (search engine optimisation), accessibility, and analytics tools to improve online visibility and track website performance.
• The world’s biggest search engine, Google, has a proprietary diagnostic and performance tool called Google Analytics. Learn how to use this to leverage your website and grow your business.

Whether it’s a brand new website, if you want to renovate or optimize an existing one, boost your SEO rankings so that you can be found more easily, or simply need help to maintain your design and content throughout your website (so that it’s always secure), always keep your plugins up-to-date and you have no broken links…. using Google Analytics is an essential tool to get fast feedback on the changes. There are many complex tasks that keep it all together, and if you’re not the techie-type, you’re going to need help from a digital agency.

Ready to Make Your Website Amazing?

Every business needs a great website these days. Websites are not just a post-it-up-there thing to do. The days are gone where you can just “build it and they will come.” Your website’s design requires careful consideration of various factors, including target audience, structure, content, and performance.

When you understand your audience’s needs and preferences, you are streets ahead in being able to create a user-friendly structure, craft engaging content, and optimize website performance… That’s how you can create a website that drives success for your online business. Remember, website design is not just about aesthetics—functionality plays a vital role in determining the success of your online venture.

Ready to take action on your website so that it stands out from the crowd? Contact us at Suncoast Digital (you can also call us directly on 07 5391 1266) to learn how we can help you design a website that drives results.