GREAT Web design hints and tips

Quay Websites Ltd is one of Gloucester's and Cheltenham's affordable web design companies offering responsive website design to business of all sizes in the Gloucestershire area. We often get asked about the process of web design and what is required to make a good web design. So we have put together a small blog highlighting some hints and tips on how to create a great website.

Before you start

Before you start a web design project it is imperative to have a clear objective in mind, what do you want to achieve with the website, who is your target audience and what are the competition doing.

Competition analysis is key. Looking at your competitors and discovering the good and bad bits about their websites will help you mould a even better website for your own company. making a list of what you like and don't like will also help your web designer and speed the design process up.

Location

Decide what areas you want to target with your new website. Do you want to appeal to the surrounding area, such as Gloucester, Cheltenham and the Cotswolds or do you want to go further afield nationally or even internationally.

Doing this will help you structure the website with text and images that will appeal to the geo location of your target audience. 

Sitemap

The sitemap is one of the most important steps in website design. A sitemap is a tree of web pages and how they will link together through navigation. Having good flow to your website will enhance the users experience and result in better conversions.

Sit down with your web designer early in the process to discuss the sitemap as changing this after the design has started can cause design issues and prolong the overall project duration.

Wireframe

Now that you have done your market research and sitemap its time to decide how your website will look. This is done by creating a wire frame. A wireframe is a outline design of how each page will look, where text and images will be placed and the proportions of site sections. 

Creating website continuity will enhance the visitors experience and make the website easier to navigate.

Image is key

What makes a website really great is the quality of images. Employ a photographer or buy high quality royalty free images to populate your website. Poor quality images is the demise of and website design. 

Content

Including written content on each page is really important for SEO. We recommend at least 250 words per page to maximise SEO. This can be hard to achieve as the content needs to be unique to you. Consider employing a wordsmith to help create the content. 

Another important part of website content is the use of video. Video engages the visitor and people are more likely to watch than read so consider how you can add video content to the website.

SEO

Consider employing a SEO company to optimise your website so that it ranks on search engines for the keywords you want to target.

Meta data, page titles, page descriptions and ALT tags need to be implemented prior to website launch. 

If you have a previous website that the new one will replace you will also want to set up 301 page redirects so as your current search engine rank is not effected.

Hosting

Once your website is built it is important to host the website on fast and secure servers. The speed of the server can directly effect the load times of your website. Slow loading websites do not rank as well on Google and can be frustrating to website visitors. The cheapest option is not always the best!

Conclusion

I hope that gives you a little bit of an idea of what goes into a good website design. Quay Websites would be more than happy to design your website and assist you in all the above areas and more. We have a large portfolio of local Gloucester and Cheltenham companies that have used our website design service as well as large national companies. 

Don't hesitate to get in touch to discuss your web design project!