When you are planning to design a new website, it is a crucial decision for your business. As your website happens to be the face of your brand from where your potential customers gain knowledge about what you do, you need to ensure that your website stands out. When a website is designed correctly, it can act as a lead magnet and properly convert your traffic. But if you hire UX designer who takes one wrong step, you can enter a vicious cycle of money drainage because of constant fixes.
So, if you are a business or a startup company prepping for your website launch, then there are several crucial tips that you have to keep in mind before you go for designing a website. But lifting the burden of research from your shoulders, we are revealing to you the strategies that separate the best-performing businesses from the rest.
These are the top 10 things to consider when designing your website:
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Narrow Down your Targeted Audience:
Despite this being the primary step that goes into the planning before one begins website designing, several website projects have been long finished without even considering any kind of user analysis. If you want to create a website that actually reaches your target audience, increases your traffic, converts the traffic while generating sales – this first step cannot be missed.
So the crucial step that you have to take before designing a website is to mark out who your target audience is, what their needs are, and how your services or products satisfy or fulfill those needs. It is only when you have this basic foundational block in place that you can base all your content, visuals, and designs together to make the most out of your website. Your business can also have multiple primary users. So before you hire UX developer or contact a web designing company, try to narrow it down to a more focused target audience to help build a site that meets all their needs.
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Improve your Visual Brand:
Do you recall your children’s storybooks? And how mesmerized would you be as a child to look at all the pictures drawn and imagine the story being told? Well, that’s the effect of visuals. This applies to web users who have short attention spans and very low patience for reading long text content and get attracted to visuals more. If you feel that the color scheme that your brand is using is a little outdated or looks drab, then you might need something better, more appealing to the eyes, and attractive.
The idea is to have a crystal clear and contemporary look that is visually appealing. Yet, it is crucial to understand that when you hire UX developer, he will not take the onus on creating a brand identity for you, and you have to dive deeper into how you want to change the aesthetic appeal of your brand. A visually appealing and attractive website is crucial because several website users will fail to engage with your services and your business. They might require reading endlessly without having a graphic that can easily decode an entire long paragraph of text for them. Websites that limit their text content but incorporate more illustrations and use them to tell a story are often websites that get the most engagement as users can grasp the content better and retain them longer.
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Make your Website Mobile-Friendly:
In 2021 if you are not taking full advantage of how most people have their online presence via a cell phone, you are surely missing out on a lot of traffic. One of the best ways to optimize your website is to ensure that it is developed and designed in a mobile-friendly and mobile-first way.
All your texts, images, logos, and other elements and figures should adapt themselves according to the screens it is viewed on, as most of your visitors will be cell phone users. No matter how your visitors engage with your content, you will always optimize all of the user experience with the mobile-first design. Even before you hire UX developer from a web development agency, ensure that he is aware of sensory design, mobile-first design, and adaptive design – as all of these are crucial for designing a website for mobile users.
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Intuitive Navigation:
Your website can be a very innovative platform that seems to satisfy all your clients’ needs by providing a full-proof solution to their complicated needs. But when you hire UX developer, they should ensure that your website is not difficult to navigate. If your navigation and buttons are confusing and not clear, your users will be unable to surf through your website intuitively.
Some of the ways you can optimize your website and also accomplish intuitive navigation are by using simple language for your audience to understand, tailoring your navigation according to the depth and length of your content, adding breadcrumbs if you have a heavy website and the like. All these ensure that your users get a seamless experience while navigating through your website and ensure that your website provides a deep and wonderful experience along with a clear path for conversion.
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Optimize your Website with Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
When you hire UX developer who uses the best SEO practices while designing your website, you can actually attract a lot of organic traffic to your web page by making you land on higher ranks by getting better search engine results. There are many ways to ensure that everything in your website is SEO optimized. For example, you can use some targeted keywords in the content of your website throughout the website. The crawlers and trackers of the search engine can find out the relevant keywords for its users.
So if your content speaks and hooks your reader, you will see an increase in traffic. Some of the other ways to optimize your website would mean to make your design more responsive for SERP ranking, using relevant header tags without overcrowding the title with keywords, using proper meta descriptions that are engaging and optimized, using short URLs that are optimized with keywords, and using high-quality links throughout the website. So integrating SEO principles in your website will help to enhance not only virtual presence but also increase organic traffic too.
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Add Call to Action:
One of the biggest hurdles your website will face is the absence of a Call to Action on your major pages. If you are new to what a Call to Action (CTA) means, then it is just a compelling statement that makes your customers take action depending on it. Almost all your pages on the website should include a call to action. One example of a CTA would be – “Drop your email down to avail the free exclusive ebook on Digital Marketing” at the end of a blog post.
This can make your readers feel motivated after reading the blog to take action using the button. When you include a CTA to your website, your visitors should be able to complete the action in no time. If the CTA talks about downloading a link, and the link happens to be broken, it results in a high bounce rate on your web page. Hence, when you hire UX developer, ensure that the CTA is appropriately incorporated.
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Include Social Proof:
One of the biggest platforms of marketing these days is social media, and when you hire UX developer who is professional, they will tell you the same. Incorporating social proof into your website content makes it easy to attract new potential clients and customers as these seem to enhance brand loyalty. You can do these simply by incorporating the photos and logos of your company’s certifications to showcase your qualifications.
Alongside you can include different links of your social media pages, including the photographs of those influencers who have supported or worked with your brand, adding a media section on your website that has links to different kinds of published articles and content that mentions your company, or by adding the social sharing buttons in your blog to showcase the number of times the post has been shared or liked.
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Incorporating a Scalable Solution:
Ensure that designing your website is ambitious and does not limit itself to catering to your current requirements alone. As you will be spending an exorbitant sum of money to hire UX developer for building your website, you should have some future goals for your website. If you don’t make these plans, down the line you will see several missing functions you require. Hence, scalability should be one of your top priorities while designing your website.
Focus on things like single points of failure (SPOF) as these are a must needed feature for your website to meet your future business needs. So before you go ahead with the design execution, ask questions like where will all the website data be stored, how to access it, how to create backups and the like. Aim to minimize the likelihood of your website getting compromised if anything doesn’t work in your favour. Having a backup plan for dire situations is also important and needs to be planned right from now.
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Loading Time:
One thing that makes all businesses lose leads is the website’s loading time. Most users will not wait for more than three seconds to shift to a newer site if the page does not load. This is because when visitors are searching for information to solve their problems, the longer loading time of the website can aggravate the impatience more. So while you go ahead to design your website, you must test your website way ahead of launching. One of the key reasons you should also go for a professional when you hire UX developer is that they know all the nuances of what makes a website lose customers and the like.
If you see loading time issues, you can fix it right before you officially launch your page. You should also periodically evaluate the loading time of your website to retain your customers and provide all your users a positive experience. Short loading time helps your users get the information they desire as and when they want. So if your website fails to deliver on time, your competitor’s site will surely fulfill that gap.
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Effective Security:
As technology advances with time, the number of security risks that are coming up is getting more advanced and threatens all websites’ integrity. From different kinds of malware and viruses to the threats from hackers, websites must ensure that they can prevent as many security breaches as possible both in their front ends and the back ends.
All the fin-tech business websites or websites that involve online transactions like eCommerce businesses need a different and more advanced security system to protect the information of its users. To lessen the browser-based threats, companies need to add SSL certificates to their websites. So, before you design your website and develop it, ensure that you critically review the security features you want to incorporate in your website’s framework. You will also be required to conduct regular security checks or hire UX developers who will later provide such support.
Final Thoughts
A plan when designing your website is also the first step that you need to take. These are the ten easy but vital tips that will help you ensure that your website does not need fixes often and is sustainable. A website that is built on a plan is usually more optimized and has all essential features, attractive designs, functionalities, etc. These tips essentially mean that your website has very focused content for a targeted audience and is optimized to reach out to them ideally without causing significant lags. Hence, before you hire a dedicated developer for designing your website, ensure that you are aware of all the nitty gritties of creating a website.
