The website is an interface between your customers and your business. You must plan and adhere to a checklist of vital aspects before designing a website. It must have all the information you need to display to your clients that help them to know your business and services better, understand what they are getting and how to get it.
There are different aspects of website design process. A website must have the look of a brochure, content like a magazine, cheerful like a photography album and informative and precise like newspaper. It must be zealous enough to attract fancy of intended clients and sustain their interest like a TV commercial. Keeping a website updated with the latest about your business while adapting the latest technology is the key to its success.
Before moving ahead, you need to get a smart domain name and purchase the hosting space from a web hosting service provider. Now you can jump on the website design bandwagon to create a website for your own business or for your clients. Website design is just like manufacturing a new product that goes through different phases and processes.
Website design checklist to follow
Understand the target audience
It must be clear to the website owner and designer that what the purpose of the website is. This can be easily gauged if you know who your audience is going to be. The website design of a website depends on the gender, age, education and beliefs of the visitors.
To hit the bulls-eye you must identify the purpose for the website as well. It can be meant for presenting your views, showcasing your artistic talents, advertising a specific product, brand or company, earning profits, offering services to your clients, managing some online database or as an outlet for any expression you think valuable to others.
Explore your competition
Once you understand your audience, then next thing to do is to know what challenge you will face from your rivals. It will help you to identify the musts and must-nots. An exploration of this nature identifies the strengths of your competitors to know how to get the best from your website.
If you are making an e-commerce website, then it is crucial to know who you need to beat to win your customers. It can only be known if you spend a good amount of time in research.
Short and content rich multiple web pages
Plan your website to divide the information into small but content rich web pages that need less load time. It must have all the ingredients to hold the attention of visitors. The bounce rate must be considerably less. Other things to take care for a website are typography, color combination, placements of text and images, animation and menus.
Lesser text optimised with typography
You should not overload a page with text unless you are presenting your research work to your viewers. Divide the text into small chunks of minimum 500 words per page spread across multiple pages and link them together at crucial points of continuity and curiosity. The next pages must answer the questions raised in the mind of users. Master and apply typography skills to make it readable and appealing in appearance.
Add lightweight and easy-to-load images
This is another important feature of a website design checklist, you can’t ignore. Your website’s popularity depends greatly on the time it takes to appear in the browser window. If you have placed high resolution and heavy images on your web pages, it will affect the loading time of the website. This is a crucial measure since a slow loading website will make your users press the close button or try another URL (may be of your competitor)
Colors that are web safe
You can never know what the kind of PCs or gadgets your clients are using to reach your website. So, you must apply such color scheme on your website that is safely and reliably visible on any kind of device.
What’s in spellings? Don’t get it wrong.
Incorrect spellings show a lack of sincerity on part of the website owner. You must double check to get everything correct that start with spellings and include grammar and readability of your content.
Check links and connectivity
Before handing over the control to your clients, a thorough check of your website is a must. After applying most essential grammar checking and applying a suitable design to your website, the next essential thing to check is that all the links work as you expect them to be. The connectivity of different web pages must be complete. Broken links are a great mess for users as well as from the SEO needs.
Guide through a site map
Most of the search engines look for the website map or directory page to recognize it as an organized website. A sitemap gives a path to navigate a site easily and an updated sitemap helps users as well as search engines. You must make sure that your website owns one.
Keep it updated
An outdated website will drop the visitor count drastically. You must ensure that you keep it updated with the latest about your business, products, and services.
Let them contact you!
Never underestimate the power of a contact page on your website. It is an interface to help your clients to contact you and give their feedback and suggestions. It is highly beneficial to a website’s reputation to display what the clients have to say about the business and services they are offered. It will create a sense of reliability and trust among new users.
This is a short and crisp list of pointers you need to remember and follow while building a website. We hope that you benefit from this website design checklist.
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