3 Critical Factors for Optimal Website Design
In a recent blog article, we established why your website design decision is more critical than making making your pages look ‘pretty’. (You can view the article here: Does Your Web Design Drive Away Potential Customers?)
While look and feel certainly play a part in the overall experience of your web site visitors, your website must also employ various back-end strategies to attract new visitors, keep them on your pages and engage them in a way that drives them to take action based on the content you’ve presented to them.
Website Design for Maximum Visibility and Conversion
Whether you’re creating your own web site, or hiring a website design firm to build it for you, you’ll want to ensure that the following crucial considerations have been addressed:
- A strong foundation – by now you may have heard of website optimization, a strategy which helps make your website more visible to search engines through the use of keywords, meta tags, back-links and other elements. But equally as important is your web site’s coding; the framework of your site’s pages and functionalities. With so much competition on the internet, it is critical that your website is built using the most up-to-date code in compliance with current web standards. These standards ensure that your site is free of errors, loads rapidly, and views well on many devices, among other goals. Outdated coding can hinder your ability to be well-listed on search engines, and frustrate those visitors who do find your site.
- Versatility – In these days of rapidly-evolving technology, far fewer website visitors are viewing your pages on the standard desktop PC or Mac machines; the larger percentage of web site traffic now browses the internet using laptops, iPads, and handheld iPhone or Android mobile devices. Due to the widely differing size and orientation of these various devices, your web site must be flexible enough to conform to every type of viewing screen and gadget, or risk losing a substantial segment of potential customers for your business. This is known as responsive website design, and by building your pages in this fashion, you’ll ensure that your audience can properly view and interact with your website, regardless of which device they’re using.
- Reliability – All the expert coding in the world won’t do much good if your website experiences frequent downages and interruptions. For this reason, it is important that your website resides on a dependable hosting server. Don’t rely on an ultra-cheap, fly-by-night web hosting service to provide the foundation for serving up your website pages to the public; instead choose a reputable hosting company with an outstanding service history, and round-the-clock tech support, if possible.
These are just a few considerations for ensuring an optimal user experience for your website visitors. While there are countless factors that play a part in a remarkable website for your business, ignoring the above concepts will ultimately undermine your best efforts, and therefore should be non-negotiable.
If you’re creating your own website design, be sure to start with thorough and comprehensive research to meet these all-important criteria. But if it all feels a little too overwhelming, it’s well worth it to hire a professional web design firm to make certain all the right pieces are in place. Rest assured, the return far outweighs the investment.
PearTree: The Web Design Experts
At PearTree Design, we have the ability and expertise to create eye-catching, custom website designs for every type of business. With our talented team of website design experts, developers and animators, there is no project or website design we can’t handle.
We can also provide powerful tools, such as custom review pages, YouTube videos, and social networking pages that help increase exposure and presence over the web.
If you haven’t yet established a web presence for your business, or simply need to update an outdated website design, take a moment to request a quote for website design services from our team. It’s free, easy and well worth your effort to make your presence available on the web!
