How many times have you clicked off a website because it feels like it’s taking a decade to load? Or clicked off because the design feels like an assault on the eyes? Or because you just can’t make heads or tails of it?
This, unfortunately, is rather a common occurrence for businesses. The website your mate Dave threw together for you in 2010 is not going to hold up today; just having a website isn’t good enough anymore. Your website needs to be responsive, fast, and easy to navigate, among a whole host of other factors.
We’re going to look at the key things you need to consider for your business’s website, whether you’re building one for the first time or updating your old one.
Design and UX Aspects
It’s unavoidable that people will judge based on looks and first impressions. This is why your website needs to put its best foot forward right from the start.
UX
UX means user experience. Your website’s design has a direct correlation to a user’s experience with your website. UX will be the cornerstone for your design and will shape the way you approach your project. It bridges the gap between design and function.
We can use designer and information architect Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb tool as a checklist for good UX.
• Usable: The product or service needs to be simple and easy to use. Designs should be easy to understand.
• Useful: Needs to fulfil a need. If the product or service is not useful or fulfilling the user’s wants or needs, then there is no real purpose for the product itself.
• Desirable: The visual aesthetics of the product or service need to be attractive and easy to translate, and meet all the requirements needed.
• Findable: Information needs to be easy to navigate. If the user has a problem, they should be able to find a solution quickly. The navigation should make sense to the user.
• Accessible: The product or service should be designed to meet the accessibility needs of its users. (More on this later).
• Credible: The company and its products need to be trustworthy.
• Valuable: Users must have a reason to use your product. A valuable product solves problems and achieves what the user is looking for.
Our blog titled ‘Readability, Search Ranking, and Writing’ also covers how readability can play a role in your UX and will affect your design decisions.
Design
Now that we’ve covered the importance of considering user experience when creating your website, let us focus specifically on web design.
So why is your website design so important?
1. First Impressions
As previously mentioned, first impressions count. This is how any new, first-time consumers will judge your business. Your web design is how your audience perceives your brand, and this will decide whether they stay or leave your page for your competitors.
2. It Aids Your SEO
Many web design elements and practices influence how content is published on your website. This, in turn, affects how search engine spiders crawl and index your website. Making your website easy to crawl enables better SEO and improved ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). If your SEO strategy is not up to scratch, you will be fighting an uphill battle for visibility. Web design isn’t solely about visual design; having clean web coding as part of your design will also improve your SEO.
3. It Sets An Impression For Customer Service
In addition to judging how well and capable your business is from your design, your potential customers will use your web design as a way to judge your customer service. No effort into web design = no effort into customer service. Your website is the equivalent of your digital storefront; you want it to be inviting and friendly to attract customers.
4. It Builds Trust
People do not trust poorly designed websites. A poor or outdated website comes across as dodgy and makes your business seem shady or illegitimate. People will not be spending money where they don’t trust. A modern, updated website signals professionalism and conveys trust.
5. Your Competitors Are Doing It
If your competitors already have beautiful, well-designed, thought-out websites, they’re leagues ahead of you. Your potential customers will be flocking towards them and turning their backs on you. Your competitors’ SEO will also be much better than yours, meaning they will be ranking much higher on the SERPs.
Accessibility
Finally, a point that ties into both UX and visual Web Design: Accessibility.
Having an inaccessible website is going to alienate a big portion of your potential customer base. Even a few small changes to make your website more accessible can have a massive impact on your users. Here are some tips you can take forward to implement into your website:
1. Add Alt Text to Images
Alt Text describes the content of your images to those who cannot see them. This is important for websites that utilise multiple images and diagrams, as without it, they are invisible to screen readers. Alt Text provides crucial information to screen-readers and braille output devices by explaining images. This is a super quick and easy way to improve digital accessibility.
2. Use Headings
Headings help to structure a page layout and allow the reader to navigate it more easily. Proper use of both headings and sub-headings makes your website structure easier for visually impaired users and search engines to understand.
3. Make PDFs Accessible
A PDF, or Portable Document Format, should be made accessible to ensure that all individuals can access and interact with content effectively. Accessible PDFs enable screen readers to interpret the text, images, and other elements accurately. A ‘tagged PDF’ is also the only type of PDF to support headings and Alt Text for images. Adobe Acrobat is the best PDF tool out there and comes with a PDF accessibility checker to streamline the accessibility process.
4. Have Sufficient Colour Contrast
The foreground and background of your website need to have sufficient colour contrast for people to be able to read it. This might include changing your visuals or font colour. Colour blindness should also be taken into account.
5. Avoid Using Tiny Fonts / Make All Text Clear
Whilst users can zoom in and scroll on webpages, you shouldn’t expect all users to be able to read your webpage. Choose a font and font size that is clear and legible to all users.
6. Provide Transcripts and Captions
Videos are an effective way to exclude two audiences – the visually impaired and those with hearing difficulties. All videos on your websites should have captions added to them and/or a transcript provided to make them as accessible as possible.
7. Have Consistent Navigation
Check that your website navigation has consistent placement, styling, and naming across your webpages.
8. Don’t Use Colour Alone To Convey Information
Colour should not be used solely to convey information. This makes content inaccessible to the visually impaired and those with colour blindness. Instead, provide additional identification, such as asterisks (*), to mark required fields.
Website Performance
A speedy website will help keep visitors on your pages longer and increase the likelihood of them completing conversions, whether that be making a purchase or signing up for something. Pages that load quickly will also perform better in search engine rankings.
So, what affects your website’s performance? And how can you measure this?
For measuring your website speed and how users experience a website, you use the Core Web Vitals as your guide. The Core Web Vitals are a set of three metrics that measure how users experience a website:
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes for the largest content element on the page to load.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how much the page’s layout moves around unexpectedly during loading.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures the longest delay a user experiences between when they initiate an interaction with a webpage and when they see a visual response.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool that can measure a single webpage’s performance and provides a Core Web Vitals assessment along with recommendations for improvement.
Here’s how you optimise your website for the best performance:
1. Optimise Images
Images with larger file sizes slow down your page load times because the user’s browser has to download more data. Optimise your images by choosing the right image format (JPEG for photos, PNG for logos or icons), compressing your images to reduce file size, and specifying your image dimensions using <img> tags to prevent layout shifts.
2. Be Mindful When Choosing Fonts
Avoid using web fonts and opt for system fonts that are already installed on users’ devices, so they load instantly and don’t require downloading. Additionally, avoid turning text into images; this hurts your page’s UX as the text is no longer selectable, searchable, or accessible.
3. Minimise Unnecessary Redirects
Redirects automatically send users and search engines from one URL to another, but too many can slow down your site.
4. Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests
An HTTP request occurs when a browser requests information from a server, such as when it needs to load a file. More requests will mean slower page load times as each request requires a round-trip between the user’s browser and the server. To reduce the number of HTTP requests, you can remove unnecessary elements and use fewer plugins.
5. Minify CSS and JavaScript Files
Minifying means making your code files smaller without changing how they work and therefore speeding up your website. Web developers can minify code by:
• Removing unnecessary characters, such as extra spaces and line breaks.
• Deleting code comments and formatting.
• Getting rid of unused code.
• Using shorter names for variables and functions.
6. Use a Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of servers spread around the world that deliver content to the users nearest to them to speed up your site. To use a CDN, choose a trusted provider or find a hosting provider that incorporates it into the plan.
We recommend Domain Dash for all of your website hosting needs.
Website Hosting
Whilst also a major factor in website performance, website hosting deserves its own section to explain.
The quality of your web hosting affects how quickly your site loads and its ability to handle traffic spikes.
There are several different types of hosting available to you:
• Web Hosting: Web hosting is the cornerstone of your online presence, providing the necessary infrastructure to store and serve your website to visitors. Web hosting is ideal for small to medium-sized websites, offering reliability, scalability, and ease of use.
• Dedicated Hosting: Dedicated hosting offers performance and control, with a dedicated server exclusively for your website. Ideal for high-traffic websites and resource-intensive applications, dedicated hosting ensures maximum uptime, security, and customisation options.
• Virtual Hosting: VPS hosting offers a cost-effective solution for startups and growing businesses. With this, your website resides on a virtual server that shares resources with other virtual servers, allowing you to enjoy the benefits of dedicated resources and enhanced performance.
• Managed WordPress: Managed WordPress hosting is designed specifically for WordPress websites, offering optimised performance, security, and support tailored to the WordPress platform.
All of these hosting options are available to you via Domain Dash. In addition, Domain Dash offers ultra-fast speeds with 99.9% uptime and 24/7 customer support.
Learn more on Domain Dash’s Website.
Your website should be built to last and easy to update as your business’s offerings evolve. By improving your website and making sure it is built to last, you can improve your brand’s online visibility, incentivise users to use your website and stay for longer, and drive conversions. If you’re looking to improve your business’s traffic, investing in a professional website build/redesign is the way to go.
If you’re looking for a website redesign or need help getting your business online, please get in touch or explore our website design and development services today.
