Web Service

A Beginner’s Guide to Designing a Website

Let’s start with understanding the importance of website design.

A well-designed website helps in showcasing your offerings and establishing a strong brand identity, supports lead generation, engages your ideal audience, and reflects your credibility. Andall these things are must-needed, especially when you are building an online store.

To ensure everything is in place and your outcome (the website) is as you wanted it to be, you just need to follow a few simple guidelines while designing your website. It will possibly attract your users’ attention and keep them on your website for longer.

Below are a few tips you need to take anote of:

  • Set your goals

Designing a successful website is more than just deciding on a hosting company, a domain name, CMS (Content Management System), and a colour scheme. You need to set clear priorities by analyzing the things that matter the most to your business and include all of them in your website.

Browsing through your competitors’ websites can also behelpful here. See how they have listed their products and presented the information. Also, observe how they communicate their brand and what makes customers keep going back to them.

Do create basic pages like Homepage, About us, Careers, and Services.

  • Design a wireframe

Now that you have set your priorities and analyzed your competitors’ websites in the first step, you can start designing a wireframe or a blueprint of your website. You can either create this online using digital tools or simply with a pen and paper.

Herein, you can follow three simple steps to ensure you move in the right direction:

  • Create a rough sketch while just focusing on the content and figuring out how the user will interact with your website, rather than deciding and fixing the actual look and feel of your website. You can decide on simple shapes and placeholder text. Remember, its just a planning stage.
  • Create a black-and-white layout that depicts an accurate representation of your website. At this stage, you don’t need the design specifically, but just accurate sizing and clean lines. You can take the help of tools like Sketch or Balsamiq.
  • Create a mock-up that looks exactly like your actual website, including images and a colour scheme.

  • Keep your target audience in mind

As you progress with your website design, always look at it from a user’s eyes. Think about their needs while setting priorities, formatting, choosing images, determining navigation and other activities.

A few important elements that help in creating a positive user experience are – simplicity, clear CTA (call to action) buttons, responsiveness, and accessibility.

  • Use visualsto tell your story or wherever needed

As a website is more or less a visual experience, focus on the images that will appealtarget audience and help in enhancing brand awareness. Even if you don’t have actual images, you can use stock images from websites like Unsplash and Pixabay. However, if you are using stock images, ensure that you use an original one andthat people in the images look like your target audience whilemaintaining consistency with the style of images.

Using visuals will help you maintain an expressive and stylistic consistency across your website.

  • Keep tracking your performance

Now that you are all set to design a website, start with it. Once you have designed and launched your website, it will continually evolve as your business will grow.

Right from the start, track your website performance using data reportsto see what is working for you and what isn’t. You can extract these reports from tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

After analyzing your website, you need to optimize it for search engines to rank at the top on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). As the process involves technicalities, you would need tobuild a team of experts to devise effective SEO (search engine optimization) strategies for your website. This might involve high additional expenses. If you want a reasonable alternative to this, you can outsource SEO services to reputable companies like Bigrock. Their team of expert professionals can help you improve your rankings on SERPs and achieve a spot in the top results for relevant queries.