Practical Website Design Tips To Help You Craft The Perfect Site

Most modern businesses have a website, and if you don’t then you need to think about making one. After all, e-commerce sales make up a significant proportion of the UK’s total revenue, and most customers look for a website before they make up their mind to use a supplier or business. Practical website design can help increase conversion rates and traffic.

Also, the pandemic and the lockdowns that ensued have shown consumers the many benefits of using digital tools to shop and conduct research, and so businesses need to have a strong online presence if they want to make an impact on today’s corporate landscape.

While there are many factors involved in building up an online presence for your organisation, a website is the first and most important step.

Almost every platform on the internet will lead interested users onto your website, and it’s considered the definitive place to find information about your company.

So, you need to make sure that your website meets the needs and expectations of your target market and anyone who happens to stumble across it.

Whether you’re launching a new business and need to make a site for it, or your existing company has an old and outdated site that needs re-doing, we’re here to help.

In this article, we explore some of the most important ways you can manage your website design process to ensure that the end result is innovative and will help your business to achieve its goals.

Learn The Basics Of SEO And Website Design

Before you jump right into hiring a web design agency and making a plan for your site, you need to first understand search engine optimisation and how it links to web design. These two practices are intrinsically linked and are crucial to ensuring that your website helps you to generate leads. If you don’t understand these practices, then you might struggle to inform an outsourced agency about what you need, and you might not purchase the services you require to meet your goals. So, take the time to do some basic SEO and website design research and understand the link between the two practices before begin planning and building your new website.

Conduct Competitor Research

To ensure that you understand what you’re up against, you need to conduct thorough competitor research. That means not only reviewing the websites of your known competitors but also any business or platform that is ranking for your target keywords. Use your SEO knowledge to help you identify sites, platforms and content that you’re competing against online and then work out a strategy to help you ensure that your website achieves the goals you set for it.

Work With Professionals For The Initial Set-Up

While templates and other time-saving solutions might seem like they make it easy to get your website off the ground quickly and cheaply, they often make it look unprofessional. Also, you can’t adjust them and add the extra features you need when you need them. So, it would be best if you considered getting your initial website design created by a team of experts. Website design specialists like Smart & Slick can help you with every aspect of the process, ensuring that you get the perfect site you’re looking for.

Come Up With A Plan

With the relevant information at your disposal, it’s time to formulate a plan for your website design. You need to think about how many pages you’re going to include, what type of media you want to post, whether you want a business blog and more. If you’re working with a specialist website design agency, then they can advise you on the best options for your business. You can also use the research you conducted to ensure that your site provides everything your competitors’ site does and much more.

Buy The Domain

As mentioned already, building a custom website is the best approach if you want to ensure that your website is original and that you can adjust it as you see fit. That means buying the rights to the domain name you want. There are plenty of companies that offer domain registration, so you can choose one and then select the domain name you need. If the name of your business isn’t available then consider changing it slightly using a hyphen or another piece of punctuation.

Alternatively, you could shorten the name of your business in the domain name, to make it original. Each domain can only be registered once, so if your business name is a common one or it’s named after a noun then you might need to come up with a way to adapt it to ensure that you get a domain that is recognisable as belonging to your business but also completely unique.

Think About The Details

While big-picture issues such as written content, images and features are important, you also need to consider the small details. Small factors, such as font, menu options and disclaimers, can make a major difference to the usability and overall look and feel of your site. So, make sure that you review every aspect of your website’s appearance and function, however small, so that you can rest assured that your site is perfect before you share it with the world.

Keep Adapting And Updating Your Design

Once you’ve designed and launched your website, it’s easy to think that the hard work is over, and you can sit back and relax. However, website design is an ongoing process that requires regular revisitation if you want to ensure that your website remains popular and useful to your target audience. Updating your website regularly is important, both for usability and SEO, so make sure that you set aside time every few months to review your site and look out for new trends in your niche that you can incorporate into your current design. A dynamic approach like this should help you to ensure that your site is always fit for purpose and meets the varied needs of your target market and current customer base.