Consider the following tips for best practices in website design:
Website Strategy
Before you ever begin to build your website there are two things that you need to have. You need to have a goal for your website and you need to have a strategy to accomplish your goal. Create your best website design by considering the goals of your website, what you’re looking to achieve by having a website. Once you know your goal you can begin to develop a strategy of meeting the goal. Some elements of your website strategy should include:
Who your target audience is and what appeals to them
How your competition is reaching the target audience
How you will measure your performance, including traffic, conversions, and customer satisfaction
What your website will do, for example provide information, sell products, etc.
What will differentiate your site from the competition
Customer Centered Approach
Also referred to as User-Centered Design, or UCD, considering the customer is a key of web design. The site needs to appeal to your visitors instantly to make it relevant for the user. The messaging, navigation and hyperlinks on the page are important elements that help to attract your targeted audience. The audience should dictate the content of the site as well as your marketing approaches.
You need to consider your desired audience. Is your audience everyone, kids, young adults, older adults, young mothers, men who enjoy sports? If your site targets children for example, it will need to be colorful and interactive but if you’re targeting young adults you might want a site that’s more intriguing with a dark color palate to it.
Web Analytics
The web design of you site should be driven by web analytics. You’ve got to make sure you have the right analytics tools in place and set up correctly to create a successful site. Google Analytics is a great free alternative that is easy to use.
No matter which tool you’re using you need to start with the analytics, it is the best way to know how your visitors are responding to your site. It is important to use your analytics to determine which areas of your site are working and appeal to people and which need to be changed.
You also need to monitor which of the calls-to-action are working. If you have a sign-up for a newsletter on the home page but discover that a relatively small percentage of your traffic comes from the home page perhaps changing where the call to action is located will produce more traffic clicking through. This is the type of help your analytics, when monitored properly, will give you.
Accessibility
You want your website to be accessible to all users who may want to visit it, including disabled and non-disabled web users, no matter what browsing technology they may be using. When building a website you have to keep in mind that not all web users are using the same web browser that you are using. Some browsing technologies include text only browsers, browsers that read the content off the screen aloud, small handheld devices such as smart phones with very little screens, screen magnifiers, and slow connections just to name a few of the possibilites. To ensure that everyone has access to your website you must provide alternatives to images, JavaScript, Flash, and audio & video you must also be careful of how your pages look in the different browsers.
Building Trust = Increasing Conversion Rates
People can be a little leery of some of the things they see online, and justifiably so. When it comes to making purchases online they are even more cautious. This makes it important to build trust with your site visitors.
Including your brick and mortar address and phone number on the website is a way to build trust. Offering an easy to find privacy policy on your site is another trust building technique. Clearly explained shipping information including cost is another way to help the visitor trust you. Finally the design of the website needs to look professional. Sites that are poorly designed do not give off a trustworthy vibe.
If you need help with your website design in Miami, call the experts. Miami web designers have experience not only building sites from the ground up but also re-designing current websites to make them more successful using the best website design practices.
