Website design involves a lot of moving parts. The increased focus on user experience and engagement has mad the process of web design a bit more challenging. User experience is more than just a buzzword, it is essential to have in place for a website to facilitate business growth and success.
“In essence, user experience measures the quality of site interactions, which in turn measures the quantity of site success and conversions,” Casey Weisbach of Forbes explained. “An increasing number of businesses are finding the value gained from investing in user experience as part of their digital marketing strategy.”
Whether you’re an agency or business owner ready to launch your online presence, the following website design must-dos for maximum business growth and success can make an impact. From search engine ranking to conversions, let’s take a deeper look at.
1. Integrate Process Documentation
Before beginning any business process, it’s critical to have a model or system in place in order to have consistent success. Process documentation can make this happen. In fact, you can streamline all your website design tasks using a working process documentation system.
“Today’s world consists of users who just want to get things done. They have so many things competing for their attention—they demand intuitive and task-based information, which is where process documentation becomes key,” process documentation specialists Lucidchart explained.
Recommended for you: 6 Important Elements of Modern Website Design of 2018.
2. Never Forget the Importance of Optimization
The ability for your website to be able to rank among competing sites on search engines should always be a priority. How you do that is with search engine optimization, SEO. The optimization tactics SEOs employ can take a website to the next level, but this optimization starts during the actual website design stages.
Keyword rich content, site speed, optimized SEO titles and meta descriptions, proper header tags, business domain name, and much more are all important to utilize during web design. Launching a site that is optimized and ready for Google to rank is an absolute must-do.
3. A Fast Website Is A Winning One
On the topic of SEO, site speed is one of the most important factors to ensure you have in place during website design. You may think that this is an afterthought, once the site is live, but this is a common misconception.
Designing a site with speed in mind can make a huge difference in the user experience you are providing to users. For example, if a site doesn’t load in three seconds or less, users will abandon it for a competitor site. This is especially true when it comes to mobile searches, which make up the majority of all searches.
4. Have Plenty of Content On-Page
Content development is still important when it comes to website design. You definitely don’t want to have a site with thin content. This is mainly because of sites with more content rank better. For example, 2,000 to 2,500 words have been found to rank the first page Google.
“Keep in mind that while it may be tempting to sacrifice quality for an excessively verbal article, you should resist the urge to do that. Your readers won’t appreciate a great deal of “fluff” in your articles just to meet a word count. That, to me, is the worst thing to do,” John E. Lincoln of Search Engine Land explained.
If you’re writing content for your website, be sure to make it actionable, informative, and very long. Longer content simply wins, and having it on-page is a must-do. You can also capitalize on more keywords naturally when you write more content for each of your web pages.
5. Ensure Your Website Design Serves Up Mobile Usability
Having a responsive mobile website is a must-do. However, there are a lot of other aspects that go onto mobile usability these days. We already discussed site speed, but don’t forget about other aspects like navigation via mobile, font, and visual content.
For example, if you have a website that is perfect via desktop, but not so navigable on mobile devices, you are losing traffic and conversions. You can check your site’s mobile usability using the Google Mobile-Friendly tool. It also doesn’t hurt to navigate your business on your smartphone to get a user perspective.
You may also like: Top 5 Local SEO Strategies to Increase Your Traffic.
In Conclusion
The above website design must-dos for maximum business growth and success are certainly not the only tips and tricks out there. There are plenty of factors that go into website design, but the above are among the top. It’s important to have process documentation in place and a clear SEO plan. This is especially important for agencies. Don’t rush design and only launch your best work. What’s your top website design must-do?
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
