Things to consider when designing and developing a website
Things to consider when designing and developing a website
From an eye-catching design to creating a digital strategy to ensure your website will get found by search engines, there is a lot that goes into designing and developing a website. We have created a list of 15 things that we think will help you through the process of developing a unique user experience that will turn your website visitors into loyal customers.
Choosing A Domain Name
Domain names are often the most overlooked part of designing a website. It is crucial that you pick a domain name that accurately represents your business and what products or services you sell. Why is this important? The answer to this question is that search engines will find your website much easier if you have simple spelling, an obvious word that describes your product/service and ensuring that you have the right domain extension for your location.
For example, if you have a building company in New Zealand and your company is called ‘Coastal Builders’ it would be more beneficial to choose the domain name ‘costalbuilders.co.nz’ rather than ‘coastal.com’ or ‘costalbuilders.com’ because search engines can tell what industry you are servicing by adding the word ‘builders’ in the domain and that you are in New Zealand because you have the domain extension ‘.co.nz’ rather than ‘.com’.
Content Management System (CMS)
Choosing the right content management system for your web development project is IMPORTANT! This is how you build your website, control your website, update content on your website & much more.
There are many different content management systems available like WordPress, Silverstripe, and Shopify (to name a few).
Before choosing a content management system it is important to think about what you would like your website to do and how advanced you are at web development. Some content management systems offer an all-inclusive package that includes everything from hosting to the website page builder. Whereas others such as WordPress require you to source your own hosting provider and page builder. And other content management systems are more suitable for E-Commerce such as Shopify or WooCommerce.
If you’re not sure what CMS is best suitable for your website, please get in touch with our team and we’ll help you to consider all angles of your new website.
Modern Website Design on Mobile & Desktop devices
Often, customers associate the quality of a particular product or service with the website design. Which makes a modern web design one of the most important things about designing a website. Having a modern web design helps with creating a good user experience (UX) for people who visit your website. Having a good user experience that is also mobile-friendly will make it easy for your visitors to navigate around your website to find what they are looking for, which will rank you higher in search results and give you a better conversion rate.
Branding
Branding is important to all business’ – large or small. Similar to the design of your website, a prospective customer will subconsciously decide how much they are willing to spend to purchase your product or service purely based on your company branding. It is important that your branding accurately represents your company and attracts your target market successfully. Ensure your branding is carried throughout your website consistently & your logo is placed in an eye-catching position on your website so that your website visitors will remember your brand.
Effective colour scheme
Colours are more important than you may think! Colour schemes have the ability to affect human behaviour and emotions. The study of this is called colour phycology, colour phycology in digital marketing can be a very useful tool as it can allow you to use certain colour schemes that you think your target audience may respond to. For example, studies show that blue reflects trust and peace whereas green reflects peaceful, growth and health. Researching what different colours evoke in human behaviour may help you give people visiting your web page a great impression!
Target Audience
A target audience is a group of people who you would like to market your product or service to. Different variables to consider when narrowing your target audience might include age, gender, habits, behaviours likes and dislikes. The more familiar you become with your target audience, the easier it becomes to market your product or service to them. By focusing on your target audience during your web design process will help you create an authoritative website for them which will increase engagement, decrease bounce rates and increase conversions.
Navigation
If you want people to stay on your website, you’ll need to make sure that it is easy to navigate, otherwise, your customers might leave and never return. To ensure that you design a website that is easy to navigate conduct research on how you would navigate through the website if you were a new web visitor. Another way to improve your website’s navigation is to add a site map and ensure that your site has no broken links – this will also help search engines to crawl your site.
Calls to action
During the web development process, make sure that you design your website with multiple calls to action so that your web visitor knows how to get in contact with you or how to reach your contact information easily. Your site should always include at least one call to action per web page.