Website Design Best Practices

1. Establish your goals

One of the first things your web design consultant needs to consider before starting work on a Web design project is to be clear about the client or organization’s goals. What is the client trying to achieve with the new website or redesign? What is the website’s main purpose?  If the client is unsure, then these should be discussed and agreed upon. A clear direction is essential if the design is to have a purpose.

Remember that a website isn’t a piece of art. It’s an interface that serves a function. That function may be to sell products, to deliver informational content, to entertain, to inform or to provide access to a service. Whatever that function is, the design must focus on fulfilling it. Goals are also important, especially if you’re doing a redesign of a website. Questions like why you are interested in doing the redesign: are you looking to grow the number of sign-ups, decrease the bounce rate or maybe increase user participation?

2. Identify your target audience

Who the client's target audience is will play a big role in how the website should appeal and function. There are many demographics here that can influence design for a target audience. For example, age, gender, profession and technical competency. A computer game website for a younger audience needs a different style than that of a serious business journal. Usability should play a bigger role for older and less technically savvy audiences.

3. Determine your brand image

A lot of designers tend to get a little too inspired by the latest trends and then implement them without thinking first about what sort of image they really should be conveying. Glossy buttons, gradients and reflective floors may work for some websites, but they may not be right for the client's brand.

Think about color. Think about the feel you want to achieve and emotions you wish to elicit. The web design should embody the personality and character of the client's brand. Everything has a brand; even if you don’t sell a product or service — for example, if you run a blog — your website still has a certain feel that makes an impression on your visitors. Decide what that impression should be.

4. Goal-driven design direction

Once the website's:

• purpose has been established,
• goals that the business wishes to achieve have been identified,
• the target audience identified
• brand image established

we can together proceed to implement it. So how do you make design decisions sync with your strategy? The following can illustrate this with a likely example.

Suppose your main objective is to increase the number of subscribers to your Web service. How can your design help accomplish this goal? The following three techniques could make a difference:

• Make the “About” snippet on your landing page as clear and concise as possible. Your visitors must not have any confusion about the function of your website.
• Use color and contrast to make the registration button or link stand out. If people can’t find it, you won’t get many sign-ups.
• Streamline the registration process by removing unnecessary and optional elements; people can fill those out later. If the form looks long, people may be put off of filling it in.

These are just three ways one can lead the design towards accomplishing the goal of increasing the number of sign-ups to your service. Your goals may vary, but the strategy is the same: shape and focus all the design elements towards meeting those goals.

The same strategy applies to the client's brand and audience: design the aesthetic that best defines it. If the client's website’s focus is entertainment, then create an “experience.” Be free to use much color and imagery to shape that experience. On the other hand, if the website is focused on information consumption, for example, a blog or a magazine, then focus the design on usability and readability. Create an interface that fades away and doesn’t distract the user from accessing the content.

5. Measure results

Once we've designed and deployed your website, it’s time to measure the success of the website. This is just as important as the first two steps. Until you test how well the design performs, you won’t know whether or not it is effective in fulfilling the business goals.

If the goal is to increase the number of sign-ups to the client's service, measure it and see if your changes are making a positive impact. If the goal is to increase the number of subscribers to the client's blog, check the RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") stats. If the goal is to increase user involvement, determine if more comments or more forum posts or whatever else is relevant in your context.

Enlist the input and feedback from friends, family, possible business patrons, and others, regarding your newly developed website. This is a very good way to check if the website design is on the right track. Be careful though not to implement every suggestion people make. Everyone has different tastes and wants, so everyone is going to have a different opinion about what your website should look. If you do collect feedback, look for patterns; see if there are common issues that crop up that may need to be addressed.

Measuring various website metrics is a whole science unto itself that you can certainly discuss with your Innovation Design consultant. However in-depth your analytics are at this stage doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that you have some way of measuring and evaluating your key objectives. You can use this information to see if you’re moving in the right direction with your design and with any future changes you or your client make.

6. Kaizen

There is a Japanese philosophy called “Kaizen”. It focuses on continuous improvement using small steps. As the client evaluates their new website, they need to be thinking of Kaizen because the version just published is not the final version. There doesn’t even have to be a final version.

One can always make improvements. The very nature of a website allows one to introduce these at any time, and over a period of time. If there is a mistake, it can fixed right away. In the same vein, you can introduce gradual improvements and updates to make your website more effective in serving its function.

Using the results of the measurements, you can identify problem areas. Perhaps the website's visitors cannot find the RSS feed link, or its bounce rate is too high, or an important page on the website isn’t getting enough visits. Whatever the problem is, there will always be a way to improve things.

Conclusion

The main gist of strategic website design is simply common sense. One is making something for a specific purpose, therefore, it should fulfill that purpose through its design. It is actually very easy to lose track of your goals and end up with something that is beautiful but ultimately doesn’t work in its context. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of implementing the latest design trends just because they look attractive or shaping a section of your website to resemble another website that you really like without first thinking about why you are doing it or how it fits in with the purpose of your project.

Avoid falling into these traps by thinking through every design decision made. Why is this button this color? Why are we using tabs? Why should we use icons here? Once you get into the habit of questioning your every design decision, the whole process will become much more focused. Think about the product or organization you’re representing. Think about the target audience and your brand. What will work in this context? What is expected? How can you use design to best fulfill the website’s purpose? Don’t just build a beautiful website: design a website that really works for your BUSINESS.