Website Goal

It is true that many businesses choose to have a website just to have an internet presence. What many might not be aware of, having a website can help reach a bigger market. Once you have decided your web design goal, it will become much easier to know your target audience. Constant changes might not be required as you know already how you want your website to be.

Target Audience

When deciding on the design, keep your target audience in mind. You may need to do a little research before choosing a particular design; your offline logo might not work online. Will your users be net savvy? Will they need any customized functionality? Like these, you will need to ask yourself many other questions so your users feel at ease while visiting your website.

Website Content

This is one of the most important parts of a website. A user will judge the website by the quality of the text so it needs to be well written. Also when adding images to your content, it is important to have enough spaces between the elements for your web pages not to look cluttered.

We are all aware that search engines cannot read images on the contrary having an image to describe something is worth a thousand words to a user. To make it easier for search engines to list your images in search you need to add descriptive alt tags for all image files. Also make sure that you do not include whole paragraphs in your image files as these will not appear in search engine results.

Having a website completely in flash is bad both for search engines and users. Search engines are unable to index the content well thus ranking for a particular keyword might not be as easy. For a user to bookmark a page on a flash website might not be possible. When he/she will come back at some other time, he/she might find that only the homepage has been bookmarked.

One more important thing not to forget in web design is having proper navigation throughout the website. It is highly suggested to have a sitemap for both search engines and users. This way a new page on your website will be indexed faster, plus if a user finds him lost on any web page, he/she can always go to the sitemap to locate himself.

Large Graphic Header

This is one thing that should definitely be avoided. You may think it looks nice on a high resolution screen. Know that there are still many people having 1024*768 screen resolution. If the header is too big, it may cover almost half of the page.

Too Many Colors

You may be tempted to use various colors to differentiate between elements on your website but doing it will not look attractive. It is something that was used long ago. So, if you have too many bright colors on your website it may look outdated to some people and you may lose potential clients.

Content Crammed in a Small Space

Leave enough white space on all your pages. It can be tiring to keep on scrolling to read a whole page. Best is to break the page in two or more to avoid scrolling.

Use of Fonts

You may want to use that font you just downloaded in your website. It looks way nicer than arial, verdana or all the other office default fonts. Unfortunately others will not see the font unless they have it installed on their computer. You may use these fonts for your header which is an image file.

Too Much Animation

It is okay to have some animation on your website, this include animated gif images, scrolling text marquees or flash animations. These are good to keep your website alive, but try not to have too much as it can be a turnoff to your visitors. Some flash animations can take some time to load, no one would wait too long when searching for information online. If you have your whole website in flash you may have already guessed why it is not converting as you expected.

Use of Frames

Frames can be good to organize a page but there are definitely worse than good associated with the use of frames. It is more complicated for a user to bookmark the page and return to it later on. A user might find him a bit lost if he is not technical. Thinking that the website is not working well, he will surely not come back.

Orphan Pages

Many websites have those pages that are not any other page. Some of those orphan pages do not link to other pages and neither to the homepage. They serve no real purpose. Keeping these pages live can be bad as they may still be listed in search engines and bringing traffic, the best to do is redirect them to the homepage of your website or any other page that can be more appropriate.

Blank Pages

If you are getting a dynamic website, you will probably have the option to update your pages and content via a custom CMS (Content Management System) provided by your web design firm. Some CMS will have all your pages created with your navigation tree so you can update them later on. This is not a good thing as those pages have nothing on and serve no purpose unless you add content. Best is to be able to add new pages only when you need them. Talk to your web design firm on what type of CMS you want.

Unreadable Text

Some websites have their font so small that is it almost impossible to read. You need to keep in mind that everyone might have a different screen resolution, you must take this into consideration so the font do not look too big and neither too small. Even better you can have an option to automatically increase or decrease the font size with a click.

Cluttered Content

It is important to have white spaces on your website for the eyes to rest. White or blank spaces make it much easier to read and move around elements on a webpage. Also it is much easier for a visitor to pay more attention to the “call-to-action”

Animated Backgrounds

We all know that it is a lot easier to read a book than reading online. If there is an animated background, it becomes difficult to read and annoying for the eyes.

Website Completely in Flash

No matter how much you like flash, know that some people may have flash disabled in their browser thus they will not be able to see your website. One more thing to avoid is to have a flash intro which is bad if you want to optimize your website for the search engines.

Having a good website that converts does not always mean you should have lots of graphics. Though it is important you must also give as much attention to content. Unlike what you might have heard, creating a website requires a lot of planning and time, so it is best that you avoid everything that will not help your website to achieve its purpose.

1 – Avoid Large Images

When choosing images to put on your website, you should take in consideration that there are still many people who have very slow internet connection speed. It is better to keep your images small in size unless you are creating a photo album, but still the images can be compressed so they can load much faster. If you absolutely have to include high quality images on your website, you can try not to put more than one on a page. A visitor would probably just click the back button if a website takes too much time to load

2 – Limit Flash Animations

Flash is a great tool but should be used moderately. Recently, it has been shown that the search engine Google is able to index flash files. This is a good thing but do you think your ranking will matter much if a visitor has flash disabled in his browser? It is best to avoid having important content in flash animations.

3 – Include White Spaces

This is one thing that many website forget to take into consideration. Having enough white space on a page between elements is very important for the eye to “rest”. Also if a page is too cluttered it does not look professional. Remember to include white spaces whenever necessary.

Their are many web design company out there that offer services within your price range, you just need to know where to search for them. Know that many of those firms can be new with a team of young people. Do not let this discourage you as they are definitely going to offer you a website with the latest web technologies.

Use Search Engines

Google is the number one choice when it comes to search engines. It will not take long till you find what you are looking for. Be sure to be as specific as possible when searching for better results. For example if you are going to get a real estate website your best search is “real estate web design”. This way you can come across web design firms that worked on these types of websites before.

Check on Auctions Websites

Many firms offer their services on EBay or similar websites. You can save a lot of money this way. To avoid any problems, it is good to check the portfolio if they have one available.

Contact Various Web Design Firms

If you do not need a website right away, you can spend some time contacting a few web design firms and see which one sends the best quote. Again you should not forget to check the portfolio for previous work.

Having a website is a must for all businesses these days; your business needs it to stay ahead of the game. Now the question is where to get your web design from? Outsource or in-house, you might be tempted to choose the latter but it’s better if you first look at the advantages of outsourcing web design.

Better Service Quality

Unlike in-house web design, outsourcing will provide you with better service quality when handled on a client/service provider basis.

More Experience

Having an in-house web designer can be good when you need to make minor changes. A professional web design and development firm will have all the experts to provide you exactly with what you are looking for.

Cost/Time Saving

Getting your website done by professionals will save you both time and money. You will not only have a fully functioning website, you will not have to invest more in making changes over and over again as web design firm usually test their client websites before handing over.

Stay Up to Date

Web design companies will have the latest technology from which your website can benefit. This is because they need to stay ahead of competition unlike an in-house designer.

Web redesign is not compulsory but if you want to stay ahead in the race, giving your website a new look along with new functions can prove very fruitful for your business.

How to know if your website needs a new look?

As I stated above, web redesign is not necessary and you are probably thinking same. Go to your website and visit it just like one of your customers would. Is there anything that you want changed? Or better yet; go to a competitor website and compare it to yours. Also a good idea is to get your actual users involved. Ask them for feedback, this will help you determine what will work and what not.

The good thing about choosing to get your website redesigned rather than getting a whole new website;

- It’s cost effective. You will not have to get the actual services and functions coded again.
- It will take less time. You will just need to tell your web design firm what you want to add to the website without having to design a website from scratch.

Know that changing colors alone is not a website redesign and this alone might not be enough if you seriously want to improve your website overall. To improve your website requires more than that. Do not forget to include all the features that were not possible to add in the original website. The thing is to stay ahead of the race.

Website Goals

Website redesign is a great way to stay up to date with the internet. But if you do not plan well before getting your website redesigned it might end up being a waste of time. Adding new functions and how it will help your users for example.

Competitors

Analyze your competitor websites, what are they doing. Look for the services they have on their website and how these can improve your own. Better yet, test new features that are not available by your competitors. It is a good thing to stay ahead of others.

Current Users

Before changing the looks and functions on your website, it is a good idea to get your current users involved. This way you will know what they are expecting from your website also you can get new ideas in what field to improve.

Web Design Firm

Thinking about all the new functions and how it will help users is great but contact your web design firm first to know if these will be possible to add or not. It is good to see with different firms to see where you can get better offers and get what you are expecting by a website redesign.