When you build your website, you’re creating a platform that will reflect on your brand. While it may seem like your audience doesn’t care about design, they actually do. Moreover, when people visit your website, it could be their first impression of your company. Thus, having a website design that’s visually appealing and aligned with your brand is important.
To further illustrate, some characteristics of a good web design include usability, easy navigation, and conversion. To achieve usability in your site, ensure that your interface is intuitive so your audience can easily find the content they need. Similarly, for easy navigation, you must keep your website’s design simple to avoid clutter, confusion, and a bad user experience.
Along with the importance of having good website design strategies, you’ll find that it’s beneficial for your business too. First, good websites will establish and communicate solid and consistent brand identity, helping your audience recognize your brand easily. Another benefit is, of course, profitability. An established good web design can lead to conversion as it helps convince your audience to take a specific action within your site. This may include purchasing a certain product or service or subscribing to your newsletter.
Knowing all this, you should work towards building a website with good web design. However, before building anything, it’s important to plan out your strategy. Here are some useful tips to consider as you plan your website design strategy:
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Always Keep The Website’s Objectives In Mind
It’s important to begin with this as it will affect the rest of your design’s development. Remember that effective conversion is one of the characteristics of a good website design. However, to achieve this, you first need to establish what action you wish your visitors to take on the site. This could be to purchase a service or product, click a link, or subscribe to a newsletter.
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Have An Organized Website
When you build a website, chances are it will need maintenance in the future. As such, while planning your website’s design strategy, it’s essential to remember the need for an organized website. One method you may use is website mapping. Website maps, also knowns as sitemaps, help you track where each content is stored and view the page hierarchy. They function like blueprints of your site.
One benefit of using a sitemap is that you can use it to improve your site’s usability. This will help you see if your audience can easily access information that they may need. Some of these include your contact information, blog posts, and more. Furthermore, it gives you an overview of the site’s information architecture. A website’s information architecture refers to the organization and division of your site’s content.
With your site’s skeleton built, it’s time to conduct the necessary research to gather the information needed for your designs.
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Do Your Research
When planning out your website design strategy, one of the aspects that you should especially consider is your audience. Specifically, you could consider building your buyer’s persona and journey.
A buyer’s persona is the information about your target audience that includes certain information like demographics, psychographics, profession, and more. On the other hand, a buyer’s journey is the process where potential customers discover your products and purchase them. Then, once you’ve figured this out, you can align your graphics to what’s more appealing to your buyer’s persona. Meanwhile, you can adjust your interface design to the buyer’s journey.
After this, it’s important to visit your competitors’ websites as this will help you get ideas and address gaps. From their sites, you can learn what works and what doesn’t when it comes to website design in your industry. You can learn from their site and offer things that they don’t to maintain a competitive advantage.
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Prioritize User Experience
With your audience in mind, you should always consider user experience as it impacts numerous aspects of your website. Essentially, it determines the experience of your customers with your brand. Along with this, it impacts the decisions they make on the website.
Having an excellent user experience in your website design strategy comes with plenty of benefits. For example, it can increase your site’s conversion rate, thus increasing your profit. Another benefit is that it can improve your SEO rankings, leading to better site visibility.
One way you can achieve a better user experience is by making the design highly intuitive. Your user shouldn’t have to think too long about how to navigate your site. Of course, to some extent, what’s intuitive for the designer might not be intuitive for everyone else. This is why you should understand your target audience.
Aside from user experience and an appealing design, there are other aspects to the design that you ought to consider, including consistency.
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Maintain Consistency
When planning out your website’s design strategy, it’s important to maintain a consistent design. To achieve this, you need to make sure that every page is similar by having the same elements and layout. Of course, page layout may vary depending on its purpose but if they have the same purpose, they should have the same layout. For example, article pages must have the same layout but the home page may somewhat differ in terms of layout.
In doing so, you get to improve your user’s experience and the usability of your website. This is because having a consistent style will make your design intuitive and help you avoid confusing users, especially new ones. Furthermore, the design will contribute to effectively communicating your brand identity.
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Branding
As you strive to maintain consistency, you must continue to develop a design that reflects your brand’s identity using the right elements. This way, your design will reflect the quality of the services, products, and experience customers can expect from your brand. When done right, this can improve your brand’s reputation.
One of the ways you can achieve this is by making sure that all the pages on your site utilize the same color palette. Furthermore, you can include your logo on most of these pages and everywhere else where it’s appropriate.
Conclusion
With the countless benefits that come with having a well-designed website, it should be a priority for businesses to craft a website design strategy. If doing this sounds like too much hassle and time for you, it’s better to hire UI UX design agency or find some other kind of help, than to create a low-quality website.
To plan a good website design strategy, you need to remember to have an objective-oriented and organized web design. Additionally, you’ll also want to deliver a visually appealing design, a pleasant user experience, and effective brand communication. Conducting proper research and learning SEO for your site are also helpful ways to ensure an effective website design.
Hopefully, these tips have helped you devise a better design strategy for your business’ website.
Author’s Bio
Alex So is a freelance writer and web developer. She’s been a writer for 3 years and a full-stack web developer for 5 years working with multiple businesses. She particularly enjoys helping social enterprises build an online presence using her web development skills.
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