The web design and development processes are multifaceted and complex, and it’s essential to have the right experts on board to produce a website that meets your business goals and objectives. Since your website is one first online impressions your business will make with your prospective customers, it’s critical to use best practices in UX and UI, branding, and development. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to read our related blog post titled “12 Top Reasons for Redesigning Your Website”. At Webilize (Portfolio and Testimonials), we specialize in building optimized websites to help drive sales revenues, www.webilize.com.
HERE ARE OUR RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE BEST PRACTICES IN WEBSITE DESIGN:
1. User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI)
User experience is the intimate experience that a visitor has as they interact with the website content. UX involves the process of enhancing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty through improving the ease of use, usability, and the pleasure provided as the visitor interacts with the website. The user interface is the series of screens, pages, and visual elements, and it includes the presentation, looks and feel, and interactivity of the website. Both UX and UI are crucial to compelling website design.
2. Know your audience
One of the most critical insights in the design process is understanding your intended audience and target market. The storyboarding, market research, competitor and customer analysis are essential tasks that need to conduct. Having a customized website design that incorporates all of this data will enable you to differentiate and stand out from the competition.
3. Keep it simple, fresh, unique, and consistent
The fundamental of a robust UX/UI has a design that is simple, new, unique, and logical. If your website appears like all other websites or appears as an off-the-shelf template, you’ll miss the opportunity to create a unique impression with your visitors, which may negatively impact your sales revenues.
4. Compelling layout design
The elements of the website interface help visitors focus on various areas of the site. One technique to help achieve this is to make the focal point element larger and ensure to make good use of white space. Having an attractive layout ensures that the design catches the attention of the visitor and maintains it. Examples of good design layout practices include having a consistent header, logo and navigation, a pleasant contrast of text and background, and a right balance between text, images, and white space.
5. Typography
The font has personality, and it should speak to your audience. The size, style, and colour are essential. You can make a huge impact and connection with your audience by considering typography in your overall design strategies.
6. Colours and contrast
When choosing the right colours for your design, you should consider the psychology of colours and colour contrast. Colours used to convey visual hierarchy, elevate your composition and keep your visitors engaged on your website, as well as establish a relationship with visitors. You’ll want to maintain uniformity, convey visual cues, and keep your colour scheme relatively to a minimum.
7. Content is important
Search engines such as Google indexes websites based on the quality of the content and links. The more quality content is on your website, the more attractive that your website becomes for search engines. Ensure that you have high-quality content throughout your website and blog section. If your site has old, outdated, and poor content, your visitors are most likely bounce will negatively affect your Google rankings. Also, ensure that there is a right balance of graphics, multimedia, and video content within your website.
8. Downloadable content and call to actions (CTA)
Webinars and downloadable content such as eBooks, white papers, and case studies are beneficial to elicit a call-to-action and engage visitors within your website. The downloadable and viewable marketing assets can also serve as the basis of your digital marketing efforts to drive more traffic to your website and generate quality leads. Your website can serve as the central hub for all of your digital and social media marketing initiatives.
9. Showcase your products and services
You only need a few seconds to make a first professional and differentiated impression. Ensure you use high-quality and clean graphics to best showcase your products and services. Ensure also those reliable descriptions that match with the images.
10. Simplified forms
Contact forms are typically the primary methods through which your website visitors interact with your company to submit inquiries about your products or services. Ensure that your webforms are simple and don’t distract your visitors from completing them.
HERE ARE OUR RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE BEST PRACTICES IN WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT:
1. Site definition and planning
This stage is about the initiation and preparation of the web project. The goals and objectives of the website will be collected and analyzed, where then budgets and timelines are assessed. The project scope, Content Management Systems (CMS), interactive functionalities, and technology integrations also defined.
Website development steps to consider:
(a) Production: Who will manage the process, i.e. Project Manager or Champion, who will be the content experts; who will be the liaison with the outside contractors?
(b) Technology: Operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux), browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer), network bandwidth, programming language, Content Management System (CMS), domain name, and hosting.
(c) Web support.
(d) Budgeting: Staffing costs, hardware, and software, server, training, outsourcing fee.
2. Information architecture
At this phase, the content of the website is organized and aligns with the UX/ UI design steps. The architecture of the website prototyped using wireframing techniques: the InVision is a popular tool used today in the design realm.
3. Website design
In the UX/UI design phase, market research, persona identification, writing, organization, assembling and editing all steps are crucial. Images and content collected at this stage, and the output will usually be in the form of a vector file or wireframe.
4. Site construction
At this stage of the development process, the finalized design gets coded into the website. The deliverables at this stage are fully programmed web pages with content, graphics, and database components in place. Once the design and development completed, the website must go through a rigorous Quality Assurance (QA) testing to ensure the coding is clean, functional, has optimized loading times, and the site is responsive on all browsers, devices, and operating systems.
5. Website marketing
If you hope to use your website more than just an online brochure, then here should be an integral part of your marketing campaigns and corporate communication programs. When configured correctly, your site can act as the central hub of all of your digital marketing initiatives, such as lead generation activities and social media marketing. The idea is to generate traffic to your website, which will ultimately convert to sales revenues. Be sure to read our blog post “10 Actionable Website Tweaks that could Drastically Increase Traffic and Sales”.
6. Tracking, evaluation, and maintenance
It’s essential to have a good understanding of your website visitors, such as where the traffic generated, the bounce rates, which browsers and devices they are using, and which variables within your site are the most effective. You can achieve it by integrating Google Analytics with your website. The data generated can be used to optimize your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.
Learn how you can optimize your website to increase traffic and generate sales. Email or call us. www.webilize.com
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