Website Design
The website design structure is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Do you want to build a simple business website or a more complex educational website? Both approaches have different designs that need to be taken into consideration. What page layouts will your users expect on your site? User experience design is a huge factor for a successful design and will give a clearer idea of what elements a website needs to have.
What is Website Designing?
Web design is creating the visible part of a website, which includes page design, appearance and feel. So how can web designers use global elements in web design? To start, they need to decide what characteristics to present to the visitor. Nowadays, web designers use essential global features like fonts and colour tones while creating products or using design elements like collections and grids to make visual compositions.
What is Website Structure?
Your site’s structure is how the different pages on your site are linked with each other using internal links and their hierarchy. It is how the information on your site is organized and presented so that the algorithm can read its context well. Good website structure facilitates easy navigation for both users and crawlers which improves the SEO ranking of your website in search engines.
Why Website Design Structure Matters?
As we’ve worked with many clients over the years, We’ve been surprised at how often site structure is overlooked. On the one hand, it’s one of the most crucial aspects of a site’s SEO performance, but on the other hand, few webmasters and owners understand what it means to have a site structure that enhances SEO.
We’re going to share a few of the reasons why site structure is so crucial and then get into the how-to of developing your SEO-friendly site structure.
A good site structure means a great user experience.
When you take away the colours, fonts, kerning, graphics, images, and white space, good site design is really about a great structure.
The human mind craves cognitive equilibrium — putting pieces logically together, finding things where they’re expected, and locating what they seek. Thus, a logical site structure is amazingly satisfying to users.
As you know, the more catchy your site to users, the more appealing it is to search engines, too. This is because Google’s algorithm uses information from searchers to rank your site. Therefore, if your site has poor CTRs and low dwell time, it will not perform well in the SERPs. When a reader finds a site that they really like and has a strong structure, they don’t bounce and stay longer. Therefore, an accurate site structure can reduce bounce rate and improve dwell time, which will lead to improved rankings.
What is a Website Design Process?
A website design process is the process of designing, constructing, and maintaining a website. As soon as you build your site, you are only one step away from some maintenance, which includes security patches, bug fixes, or content updates. This is because, with technology constantly changing, your website needs to stay on top of what is new in the world.
Best Strategies to Design a Successful Website
Make your site mobile responsive.
Today, almost 50% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices and that number is only growing. As a result, it’s important to design your site to be mobile responsive – meaning that it will scale and re-layout to fit the size of any device, big or small. This way, visitors to your site will always have an enjoyable experience and can find what they’re looking for, no matter what device they’re using.
Mobile Compatibility
As more and more people use their mobile phones to access the Internet, creating a mobile-optimized website has become necessary. If you own a business and do not have a mobile-optimized website, you may be missing out on potential customers. As the use of smartphones and tablets has increased, consumers are using their phones to access the Internet more frequently than ever before. In fact, approximately 50% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices!
Accessible to All Users
Achieving a website that meets the basic accessibility guidelines is a good first step to ensure a wide range of customers can access your website from all sorts of devices, from desktops to mobiles and tablets. Accessibility has also become more important to users with visual impairments, so it’s beneficial for your business to develop an accessible website.
Create and Understand Your Buyer Persona
Your “persona” is a fictional composite of one or more of your customers. It should be a living, breathing character whom you can describe as your target customer for your brand.
Understand Your Buyer’s Journey
The buyer’s journey is a process that starts with discovering the need and ends with the purchase decision. The buyer’s journey starts with exploring potential solutions to solve a need or pain point. Next, one or more of these solutions are researched and evaluated. The buyer then decides which solution to invest in and purchases it. Finally, the buyer may continue to maintain and update the solution for an extended period of time.
Create Your Sitemap
Sitemaps are a simple and effective way to make your website more user friendly. The sitemap will help the website designer to understand more on which areas need to focus on and how to start the website structure.
Here are some basic outline for your website sitemap:
- About Us Page
- Team/Organisation Members
- Contact Us Page
- Mission/Company Culture and Values
- Product/Services
- Pricing
- Blog
That way, if your sitemap gets crawled, it won’t cause any unnecessary load times for your users or interfere with the speed at which your site can be indexed by search engines. As far as categories go, you should only use them if they make sense.
Use Search Engine Marketing and Optimization
Effective search engine marketing requires a lot of focus on SEO, but there are also other tools that can help you boost your website’s exposure. These include social media campaigns, email marketing campaigns, and other technological tools.
The importance of search engine optimization is also emphasized through the use of “good” and “bad” rankings, as well as the many different niches covered in this article.
Website Designers must Create a Responsive Design
Responsive design (i.e., mobile-friendly) is a crucial element of modern school website design. It means a wide variety of mobile devices can access your website. Good responsive design makes your web page more readable and usable on a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone. In addition, it automatically resizes and reformats your pages to eliminate that annoying and time-consuming zooming and dragging that the viewer is a barrier.
A school website that integrates responsive design can be shared and viewed through email links, or social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, which more than half of users now access through mobile applications.
Make sure your website has a responsive design. Otherwise, if your school website is not mobile-friendly, they won’t be visiting it, much less using it as a regular way to communicate with your school.
Follow the “inverted pyramid” model.
Web users have short attention spans— they can easily decide to leave or stay if they find your site valuable and useful for them. Structure your content like an upside-down pyramid. The essential information and significant messages must be found at the top of the page. Then spread and distribute down the more specific and supporting information.
For example, say you’re creating a web page about Digital Marketing. The most pertinent details—a definition and concepts of digital marketing—would appear at the top of the page. Supporting details like its benefits and how to do digital marketing would follow. The less important information would appear at the bottom of the page.
Visually prioritize key elements
Use the 5 essential building blocks of design to construct a visual hierarchy with HTML and CSS that’s clear at a glance:
Size
It’s important to correlate size with importance in any design — the most important information should be the biggest on the page and demand the most attention.
Color
Remember that a color scheme can function as an organizational tool as well as a branding/personality tool in a design.
Layout
Good formatting encourages visitors to engage with the content throughout the page and find the most important information faster.
This quarterly publication by Google uses card-based design to organize the content on the page and encourage their main goal: subscriptions. (Source: Think with Google)
Spacing
White space, or negative space, is a design tool designers use to draw attention to the most important UI elements.
Style
Picking a style that matches and highlights your brand will help you communicate your message more effectively.
Focus on your Call-to-Action buttons
Your website design would be incomplete without call-to-action buttons (CTAs). In fact, most marketing specialists would say they’re the most important element on the page and huge efforts might turn to waste if your page don’t have this important element. Strategic planning and application of CTAs can greatly improve the flow of the page and lead the user toward conversion, so you must do it right.
You must keep in mind some things when designing your buttons.
It might look basic, but it’s important to understand the actual function of the buttons before you get started. Use a button element Use an element so your users will know what they’re supposed to do. And make sure you test this on real users!
How to plan a web design for business?
To make your website as effective as possible, it’s important to set out a clear plan for the design. Start by mapping out different areas of the site and considering what each should contain. Allocate some thought to where the placement of elements will be on the page, keeping in mind how they will interact with one another.
Once this is done, it’s time to apply some texture to the wireframe layout: Start by adding a grid and then arrange page content into columns and rows. Start by mapping out different areas of the site and considering what each should contain. It’s important to have a plan before diving into creating the design, so you can save time and resources.
Start by taking a look at your design tools and determining which you will use. Tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and InDesign can help you create a mock-up of the site in a matter of minutes.
Highly Strategic Website Design Means Success
Website design is a huge part of any company’s success and in the modern business world, it has become increasingly important to have a website with a structure that is easy to navigate. With this in mind, we will design and develop a website that is easy to use and meets your business requirements. Whether you need a simple brochure-style website or an e-commerce solution that allows you to sell products and services online, we will be able to help you with all your website needs.
Website Design Service
If you are still not sure or having a hard time planning your strategies for your website design structure, we could recommend you to team up with one of the most reliable digital marketing agencies nowadays, Ubique Digital Solutions. UDS help companies create a highly structured website design that will upgrade their visibility in the digital world. UDS will help you plan and strategies making your exhausting brainstorming sweat-free. Contact us today.
