Building a website is crucial for any business, especially if you want to establish a strong online presence for your brand. To get you started, here are three essential tips for any type of business or person to consider as they begin their website development journey.
3. Prepare Brand Assets Early
Before you or your team dives into building a website, consider gathering and organizing your brand assets to ensure a smooth project timeline. This assumes the designer you hire is responsible for a full theme design or plugging content into a pre-built theme. (You should ask!)
Consider starting with a comprehensive brand kit that includes your logo, brand colors, and preferred fonts.
Beyond that, consider professional photography, videography, the text on your website, even customer testimonials, videos, and any other marketing materials relevant to your industry.
Having anytime ready-to-market-with resources ready to hand over could speed up the design process but it could ensure that your website will effectively represent your brand's voice and vision - with your refined touched always.
2. Consider Your Goals for Usage
When you plan for a website, clarify your goals of usage. What do you intend for your users (website visitors) to do with your website, and how will it align with your brand's overall strategy?
A professional web designer can help you with most layout and content decisions. However, you are able to be more deliberate with your layout and content choices. For example, why was this bolded?
Consider the core purpose of why you're investing in this website rebuild: are you building a simple site to deliver information, like a blog or resource hub, or are you focused on generating leads through contact forms and other special landing pages or interactions?
1. Don't Backburner User Experience (UX)
User experience (UX) is an aspect of any successful website, one you can't ignore. A great user experience doesn't simply consider an appealing website theme. Don't let the marketing fool you.
Having a logical site structure with intuitive navigation, so visitors can easily find their way around without error, no fault of their own even is important. A consistent and user-friendly design not only keeps visitors engaged but also reinforces your brand's credibility and professionalism.
The overall feel of your site and how easily visitors can navigate through it to find what they need is essential to consider too. Why are they there in the first place? Are they looking for specific content related to your operations? Improve their ability to find that information easier, as in sooner.
Links that works, images that load, social profile links that go somewhere, they all matter and contribute to a better experience. Avoid missing small disappoints anywhere possible.
One key component of a positive UX is responsive web design—ensuring your site appears, responds to screen sizes, and functions well on a desktop or phone. Given that a significant portion of web traffic now comes from mobile users, a responsive design is essential to avoid frustrating visitors and losing potential customers.
We Can Build It!
If it's time to replace your current website, consider hiring a local web developer near you! A professional can perform technical Search Engine Optimization ("SEO") audits on your website to find pain points in your experience to help fix and potentially help you organize your content strategy. Ever Marketing can help with your new website build or simply supporting you and your current website. How can we help you?
