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Top 10 Rules of Best Practice Website Design
Your website should be designed to impress your target market and Google
Your website is one of the most important investments you will make in business. If designed and managed correctly, it can be the most cost-effective salesman you ever employ and is also the only piece of marketing collateral visible throughout the world, benchmarked against the millions of other websites online, so it pays to make the right impression.
In modern marketing, a good website needs to appeal to two key audiences – your target market and search engines such as Google, where most web traffic now comes from. Bearing this in mind when your design or redesign your site, you will need to strike a balance between technical and SEO functionality, design aesthetics, navigation and layout.
Web design best practice is now an essential element of overall brand positioning strategies. Whether you are an online-only E-commerce business or an offline business using a website as a marketing tool, your web design and content needs to accurately reflect your entire marketing strategy.
Top 10 Guide For Ensuring The Best Website Design
To get the most from your website design, you need to consider what it will deliver to end users, search engines such as Google and you as the website owner investor. Modern websites should be optimised for SEO purposes with the end objective of delivering consistent sales leads to your business – in satisfying that objective, satisfying Google and your audience are two key stepping stones.
1. Use Google Analytics: When it comes to evaluating browsers, screen resolution, connection speed and buyer behaviour of your target market, nothing else gives you an insight into best practice web design like Google Analytics. It’s free to use and the data will influence design for the better. If you are starting from scratch, general stats similar to Analytics stats are available online.
2. Appeal to Multiple Browsers: Make web-pages for multiple web and mobile web browsers – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera etc. so that pages display without any viewing problems. Browsers are becoming increasingly ‘standards compliant’ so this issue will become less relevant but it’s still an important thing to remember.
3. Test your website: Test your web pages in different browsers as every visitor will see your pages in different browsers differently. It’s important to test screen resolutions and other preferences.
4. Clear concise content: Keep web content up-to-date, concise and valid to your target market. Using the ‘inverted pyramid’ approach, get your key points in at the top – this will avoid visitors leaving before reading what might be your competitive advantage.
5. More White Space: Don’t feel the need to use every centimetre of every web page. White space makes for a visually appealing website and makes whatever you are saying easier to read.
6. Guide Your Visitors: Understand your target markets behaviour by defining paths of interaction and set clear calls-to-action which are ultimately what converts a visitor into a sales lead.
7. Use Semantic Code: Label everything within your source code accordingly – Titles, H1s, H2s etc. Semantic code assists search engine optimisation (SEO) as it’s faster for crawlers to index the site, it’s also faster for browsers to display your web pages and it allows for easier editing.
8. ALT Tags: Remember to use ALT tags when using graphics and images to allow for search engine indexing. With most search engines having image search options, there may be small traffic wins to be had from doing this correctly.
9. Look for errors regularly: Proofread for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in content and routinely check website links through Webmaster Tools ensures long-term site integrity.
10. Consider legal issues: With scraping and duplication rife on the web, it’s important to protect your asset. Include relevant and up-to-date privacy, copyright and legal disclaimers where necessary across the site. If operating in international markets ensure you are compliant with local laws.
With so much information, advice, tips, tutorials and free CMS software available online, website design has become a public undertaking. Virtually anyone can do it, but building a website that conforms to best practice standards is easier said than done. Many amateur web designers have developed an intimate working knowledge of various coding languages and CMS software packages and can develop excellent websites but be wary before you hire someone claiming web design expertise – the proof is in a successful portfolio and a list of satisfied clients, which roi.com.au has.
roi.com.au are proven providers of quality websites in line with industry best practice
At roi.com.au our team of skilled web designers has proven ability in creating quality websites, traffic sites and landing pages. All ROI web design products are crafted with customer conversions in mind, drawing on a vast pool of SEO and pay-per-click knowledge to create the best websites for sustainable and comprehensive marketing strategies.
Posted on April 19, 2011
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One of the most important aspects is to measure and test user behaviour – once a website has been designed and built, that’s not the end of it. Web design should be an ongoing process, where you are constantly testing and improving.