How to design a website? |
Our strategic guide on ‘How to design your website’ is an educational article targeting individuals who are faced with the task of designing or redesigning the website of their organization. We have listed the key steps to follow or the questions you must ask yourself to design a website that will promote the objectives of your organization. |
How to design your own website? |
A brief step-by-step outline of the website design process is enumerated under Design-a-Website. You may read more about ´The Nine steps of website design process´ on the home page of our company's site, Website Design Company. |
Design-a-website steps
An important note about ´How to design a website´ steps below: Our assumption is that you would like to develop a custom website that is functional to meet the goals of your organization. The following guidelines cannot be applied, if you are using a website template design. If you are a website design professional, please submit a request through our Contact Us link to request more related website design resources information. You can also read about other aspects of website design on other pages of our website. |
1. Define the objectives for your website design project |
This is the very first step of the design process - define attainable goals for the project. Sometimes this step can also be a good validation of your decision to redesign your website. If you are redesigning your website for building a corporate image or brand value, pick a unique selling proposition that makes a compelling distinction about your company. It is important to note that each step of the design process contributes to accomplishing the objective of the website design project. |
2. Know your target audience |
Define the target visitors for your website. A website design or a re-design can be part of your business development plan. Identifying your target audience is a pre-requisite for both developing the right website you have envisioned for your company and for attaining the goals of the website design project as per your business development plans. You must analyze the characteristics of your audience for any specific need that you can distinctively fulfill through clever design of your company website |
3. Create the information structure for your web pages. |
How to design a website layout that is user-friendly? Here are some characteristics that will help you create an intuitive information design: |
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Identify collections of website navigation items
Logically and hierarchically arrange the links such that a user – in most cases your customer – can navigate intuitively. Organizing the information is a vital element of the website design process. Once you have your tree structure for pages ready, you will have a good idea about what you want to write in each of them. |
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Prioritize website pages
Coming up with the link structure for the website will help you design the website layout. A set of links may be more important than the others. Thus, pages must be prioritized to guide the user to the appropriate link and develop channels. Devising multiple routes to navigate to a page that is important is an advantage to the business. Also, every page may not need a link from your home page. They key question to ask is: Can your visitor easily and intuitively navigate? |
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Evaluate possible storyboards
Once you have an outline of information design ready, you must evaluate possible storyboards. Storyboards are sequence of clicks that your website visitor will perform to execute a task such as finding educational resources from your website, requesting a quote, buying products from your website, etc. Website Designs for eCommerce businesses need to be carefully crafted to develop such channels or tunnels for better sales conversion rates. |
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Space utilization balance between brand building and navigation
Attractive graphics and impressive logos enrich the presentation of your website. However, it must be noted that even if the main goal of designing your website is to build a brand image, there should be a right balance of space utilization between brand image and useful navigation. |
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Design to make navigation easy for your customer
You must keep your website’s usability in mind when you define the structure of your website. Customer-centric website navigation structure recognizes customer’s usability as the most important website design consideration. Have a simple, functional website – keep your less sophisticated users in mind for better customer experience on your sites. |
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Efficiency of information design on a website
Efficiency of website information design is measured in terms of the number of links that a viewer has to click to get to the desired information. The ease with which a visitor can spot the right information in the layout on your web page is another measuring scale for efficiency. Once you have your information design ready, you must review the link structure for these criteria. |
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Design for future expansion of your website
Your business is sure to grow if you develop a customer-centric website design with an intuitive and effective layout that balances space utilization between building image and usability. The foundational website structure that you define should provide for expansion to support business growth. |
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4. How to attract more visitors to your website? |
A big part of the answer to the question is ‘rich information ’. The importance of writing rich content for your website can not be overstated. However, it is a time-consuming process and many business owners and executives do not allocate sufficient time to this task, during the project. |
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Content that is relevant to your business
Rich and relevant content on your website is crucial to building traffic to your website. It is important to spend time to develop strategic ideas and best practices related to your business and make the content on your website valuable for your visitors. When you integrate innovative ideas and best practice processes related to your business, your customers develop confidence in your company and the brand gains credibility and popularity. A website that offers rich and valuable information will attract more visitors to the site and thus contribute to increased sales. |
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Simple, straight and unambiguous writing
When you write about your strategies for businesses in general, it is recommended to stay away from attractive sales-pitch like phrases, but write definite, contemporary and focused sentences to convey your ideas effectively. Well-written, unambiguous websites that can offer a wealth of information score over other websites that try to get your customers’ attention with catchy marketing lingo. |
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Strategic thinking depicted into Process Maps
Outline a process map in words or graphics to tell customers that you know what you are doing. This will give a comfort level for your customers to deal with your company. |
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We encourage our customers, especially Small Business ones to follow the above strategies for their Website Design projects, to build sales and traffic volume on their website. Our Small Business Website Design page has more information about developing and building our company’s personality on the internet. |
5. Create a website that will come up in searches on the Internet |
Creating a content rich site is the primary consideration for improving traffic to your website. There are several other advanced techniques such as using the appropriate words that people use to look for information and services on the Internet, listing your company’s services on internet directories, etc. to attract more people to the website. A few other effective marketing techniques such as using viral marketing, hosting a discussion forum on your website, adapt to user behavior, etc. are enumerated in our Website Promotion and Internet Marketing page |
6. How to design your website with good ‘look and feel’? |
Decide on a color that appeals to the lion's share of target visitors. Evaluate the advertising campaigns and websites of popular companies to select colors that are most appealing. People tend to develop a liking towards certain color schemes when they see it repeatedly. Studies and surveys support this finding. Our Graphic Website Design page mentions a few color schemes that popular companies have been repeatedly using. Developing a structured page schematics, and designing for your target users’ monitor resolution are other key aspects that contribute to the ‘look and feel’ of your website. |
7. How to design a website that your customers like? |
The answer to this question is: Design your website with participation from a representative set of your users. Once you have an intermediate representation of your website design, you must get feedback from your users. The templates that we use for design critique process is available to you free of charge. You can submit a request thru our Contact Us link to get your free copy. An effective design critique process will help you design for your customers. Usability is an important consideration for a successful website design project. |
How to design a good website? – Other resources |
There a number of related resources on our website. The design considerations to generate a unique and tailor-made business website are explained in our Custom Website Design Services page. A judiciously designed custom website can amalgamate the goals to position your brand, achieve the objectives of the company and serve the needs of your customers.
The common design styles centered on customer, designer, company, technology and information are evaluated in our professional website design services page. Our Graphic Website Design Services page enlists the design factors that facilitate information retrieval using the appropriate color schemes and design layout.
Advantages and disadvantages of using Flash-enabled websites may be viewed in our Flash Website Design Services page. The page also has information about using the right amount of graphics so that the size of the files does not adversely affect the page-loading speed.
Our Small Business Website Design page article sheds light on ‘how to design a functional and effective small business website’. Design considerations specific to brand building for small businesses on the web and the importance of having a content-rich website for small businesses are also explained in the same page.
Adhering to the guidelines on ‘How to design a website’ will make the promotion of your website easy to develop a successful Internet business. However an effective website design is only one of the various strategies to promote your website. More guidelines are outlined in our Website Promotion and Internet Marketing page for developing an Internet-based business by promoting and marketing your well-designed website. |
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