Website Design
What is website design?
Your website is the way customers perceive your business online. Therefore, it’s fundamental to be advised by experts in the field when designing a website to ensure that it will be well-received by all your customers. Website design goes beyond creating a pretty website layout. It is the process of planning, conceptualizing, and arranging the website content so it is not only aesthetic but functional.
Why is a website so important?
Your website is one of the most important components of your digital marketing efforts. The better it’s built, the higher the chances of sales and conversions. Website design has a huge impact on how your audience perceives your brand. You only have a few seconds before they develop their perception about your business. If you don’t have a professional and well-designed website, your audience will have a negative impression of your business right from the start. This can cause you to lose many potential clients that will search for another business website that they can trust (yes, you read it right). A poorly designed website will make your business look shady, giving your clients the wrong impression. A website gives its visitors an insight into what to expect when choosing your products or services. Website design also influences other inbound marketing strategies such as SEO, since certain web design elements affect the search engine visibility. Your website code needs to be SEO-friendly so you can win the visibility battle from the beginning.
What are some principles of Web Design sensation follows?
Believe it or not, the success of your website will depend on the way it is designed. A website designer must consider the visual design, usability, and utility to grant the desired results. Envision your website as the face of your business in the online world, keeping in mind that most of your visitors haven’t been to your business/office in-person. It is fundamental that the first impression they have towards your business is positive.
Keep your design simple. Try to maintain a clean and fresh design on your pages so it is appealing, easy-to-use and easy-to-navigate for your visitors. Incorporating too many elements on the page may distract your visitors. Your website should share the same message that all your other digital marketing channels are providing. Be consistent with the design so it matches all the elements of your brand such as the color palette, graphic elements, and fonts. Another important feature to keep in mind when designing a website is the typography and readability. The typography should be eye-catching and appealing but most importantly readable. You should incorporate SEO elements such as keywords and meta-data so your website acquires more visibility on the search engines.
You want your website to be seen by everybody, everywhere. Therefore, you must make sure that your website design is compatible with smartphones, tablets, and phablets. It also needs to load quickly, so it can provide a great user experience. Great websites combine different techniques to reduce HTTP requests, uses images that are fully optimized, and compresses HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
Web Design Checklist
- Keep your design simple.
- Share the same message as the rest of your marketing campaigns.
- Make sure the typography and readability is an asset to your user's experience.
- Make sure your website works on different devices, platforms, and browsers.
- Develop and design for your user, not for yourself.
Web Design Elements
When designing a website, it is important to integrate the visual and functional elements to maximize the performance of the site and consequently “play nice” with search engines.
Visual Elements
Visual elements are conformed by all the things you need to consider to make your website look awesome. Pay special attention to the written copy, fonts, color palettes, layout, shapes, spacing and more. Each one of these elements play an essential role when designing a website since we aim to find the perfect balance between text and graphic to create an extraordinary art piece. Let’s review the visual elements one by one:
- Written copy: The text on your website is what is going to inform your visitors about your business. It’s your hook to engage your audience. This element is vital to website design because people are looking for something beyond beautiful. They are looking for something valuable, something they can trust. Combining creative copywriting with a beautiful design is one of the most powerful tools to convert leads into loyal customers.
- Fonts: When it comes to how your information will be displayed, fonts are our best allies. Try to pair different font styles to complement the design of your website. It’s essential that the fonts utilized on your website are not only easy-to-read but also match with the essence of your brand.
- Colors: This is the most attractive element of your website. The color palette to be used on your website needs to deliver the message your brand is trying to convey while being in alliance with your brand’s colors.
- Layout: Your content needs to be displayed beautifully so it can impact your audience. Besides the appearance of your website, your layout also needs to be functional. Therefore, it has to follow a hierarchy scheme that can not only be easily read by visitors, but by search engines as well.
- Shapes: A website cannot be a block of text with some pictures randomly placed. It is fundamental to incorporate graphic elements such as shapes to gather your visitors’ attention.
- Spacing: Whitespace is also important. Don’t let your website look crammed and pay attention to the space existing within the elements of your design.
- Images, Videos, and Icons: As we have said before, a website cannot be just a block of text. It needs to have images, videos, and icons strategically placed to communicate a vast amount of information in just a few seconds. These elements should not compete with the message you are trying to convey as it can lead to distractions.
Functional Elements
- Navigation: Your website needs to be easy to navigate so users can find the information they are looking for without any inconvenience. Study user behavior on the website to understand the reason why they spend more time on a specific section of the website. You should adapt the design if you are not getting the results you’re aiming for.
- Speed: Make sure that the website runs fast. It not only keeps your users happy, but search engines respond better as well.
- Animations: Incorporating animations into websites is an effective way to grab the user’s attention and obtain feedback on specific interactions with the website’s content.
- User interactions: In digital marketing, everything needs to be measured to assure its success. Users have different ways to interact with your website: they can scroll, click, type, or do anything that you let them do. Simplify your interactions so the user feels that they have control in their buying process. Try to avoid pop-ups, avoid scroll jacking, do not underline text unless it is a link, do not auto-play the audio in your videos, and make sure everything in your website is mobile-friendly.
- Site structure: This is an important element for user experience and SEO. Your site must follow a path that is easy to navigate for people and search engine crawlers.
- Cross-browser & cross-device compatibility: Last but not least, your website needs to look great no matter in which device it is opened. It needs to load quickly and function correctly regardless of which browser your audience decides to use.
How Sensation Enterprises Builds Websites
There are different ways to build a website, different paths to choose, and obviously different results depending on how you execute the project. At Sensation Enterprises, we build our websites by following a four phase process that serves as a foundation for how your project will come to life.
In this phase, our team focuses on research. We focus on reviewing websites of your competitors to see what is the most predominant style within the industry to later perform a SWOT analysis to determine where we can take things up to another level. This is when we put all hands on deck to brainstorm what is going to be the ideal layout, colors, pictures, icons, and many other cool elements for our client’s website. During this phase, we let our team’s artistry shine by sketching how we want this website to look like.
This is when we design the visual elements, define the final look, and create the structure for the website. We rely on WordPress to do so since it allows us to scale up and expand your website with themes and plugins that you might want to incorporate in the future. Moving forward in the process, we utilize the latest coding techniques such as HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, and jQuery to shape this piece of art. We continually refine the design as we create the rest of the website.
“Let’s make sure everything is running smoothly.” The technical phase is where we create the architecture of your website, making sure that it functions efficiently and correctly. We configure the design elements and create the interactive elements on the website. We do our best to stay on top of programming advances such as PHP, MySQL, SASS, CSS, and many others.
During this phase, we test each one of the buttons, links, forms, videos, etc to make sure that everything is functioning as planned. We go through all the elements a user will interact with to ensure that they will enjoy visiting and navigating the website. We make the final adjustments to the design of your website and we set a meeting to show you our final piece of art. A website that showcases all you have been looking for and beyond.
Let’s be honest, anyone can build a website. There are tons of software available that can even do it for you, but all of them have a weak side. First, they own your website so if they decide to shut down the platform, you are lost. Second, since we are a third party, we can easily slide into your customers’ shoes to understand their needs, wants, and desires. This is why you need a team of professionals like Sensation Enterprises to help you with planning, conceptualizing, and creating your website to make it not only aesthetic but functional.