The Best Strategies to Consider When Planning Your Website Design
By Robin on November 28, 2023 in Inspiration for Websites Internet Marketing Web Design Tips and Tools
A successful web design strategy encompasses various elements and considerations to create an effective and user-friendly website. Below are essentials components to consider when outlining a successful design strategy:
Set Clear Goals and Objectives
Begin by defining clear goals for your website. This is actually the most important part. What are you trying to achieve? Is it notoriety, driving traffic, providing valuable information, thought leadership, search engine marketing or simply an elegant design that matches the reputation of your firm?
Below we break down why your objectives will outline your success:
- Guides Decision-Making: Your objectives and goals serve as the focal point for your redesign. You will ultimately be able to make more informed decisions about design, content, functionality, site architecture, and user experience.
- Measures Success: Clear objectives provide a basis for measuring the success of your redesign. You can track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as increased conversion rates, higher traffic, or improved user engagement to see if you’ve achieved your goals. Analytics are key to looking at pre-launch and post-launch traffic and conversions.
- Aligns Teams: A well-defined set of objectives ensures that everyone involved in the redesign, from designers, developers, content creators, and the law firm website committee is on the same page. It keeps everyone focused on the end goals and prevents scope creep while also setting the correct expectations.
- Optimizes Resources: Knowing your objectives helps you allocate resources more effectively. You can prioritize tasks and investments based on what will have the most significant impact on achieving your goals. When you have a clear vision, it will save hourly time, money and company resources as well as help you launch in a more timely manner.
- Adapts to User Needs: By understanding your goals, you can tailor the redesign to better meet the needs and expectations of your target audience. Ultimately you want the website to be a reflection of your firm, but it’s important to create a website that is intuitive and easy to navigate for your users.
Before diving into the visual design, technical aspects, or content creation, spend time thoroughly researching and defining your objectives. Whether it’s increasing visitors, enhancing user engagement, improving SEO rankings, or creating an industry leading website, these goals will guide every step of your website redesign process and ultimately determine its success.
Take the Time to Conduct Audience Research
Understand your target audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors. Develop user personas to guide your design decisions and ensure your website resonates with your intended users. You can also poll, interview or survey your clients and firm stakeholders on what makes your firm unique. What is your proposition value? What are your core values? What makes you the expert among your peers? It’s often a good exercise to get this feedback to understand how people view your firm.
Determine if You Will Apply an
If SEO is a goal, you should implement a strong SEO strategy from the start. This includes optimizing on-page elements, improving site speed, and ensuring mobile-friendliness to enhance your website’s search engine rankings. With a full campaign you will continue to drive rankings and authority post launch through ongoing monthly SEO work. If you simply need an enhanced SEO Setup, make sure it’s optimized as best it can be. Implement on-page SEO best practices, such as optimizing meta tags, headings, and image alt text. Create SEO-friendly URLs and maintain a sitemap to help search engines index your content effectively.
Make Exploring Your Website a Pleasant Experience
Create a user-friendly navigation structure that allows visitors to find information easily. Use clear menus, breadcrumbs, and intuitive labels to guide users through your site, and ultimately to where you want them to find information. Develop a well-thought-out content strategy. High-quality, engaging, and relevant content is crucial for keeping users on your site and achieving your goals. Consider the use of multimedia, such as videos, infographics, whitepapers, podcasts, e-books and blogs to enhance your content.
Devote Enough Time to the Aesthetics
Design plays a significant role in user perception. Your designer needs to create a design that matches the reputation and standing of the firm. Pay attention to color schemes, typography, imagery and slogans. Your brand should be clear and visible from the second someone lands on the website.
A Mobile-Friendly Site is Imperative
Ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly. With the majority of web traffic being mobile, it’s essential that your site renders perfectly all devices and screen sizes. This is not only crucial to user experience, but also to being able to rank well in Google Search Rankings.
Consider Page Speed and Performance a Priority
Optimize your website for speed and performance. Slow-loading websites will kill your web traffic and negatively impact SEO rankings. Compress images, minimize code, and use content delivery networks (CDNs) to improve load times.
Security and ADA Accessibility:
Prioritize website security by using SSL certificates, implementing security plugins, firewalls (if needed), and keeping your software up to date. Protect user data and maintain trust with your audience. You must also ensure your website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. Follow WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) for ADA compliance to make your site inclusive and compliant with accessibility standards. It should be at a minimum AA compliant to ensure screen readers can navigate and tab through the entire website seamlessly.
Testing and QA:
Before launching the redesigned website, thoroughly test it for functionality, compatibility, and performance across all browsers and devices. Your developer should be testing all images, links, redirects, code, CSS, videos (or media), and formatting before presenting it to you. The testing phase is equally as important as the planning phase. Ensure your design is working orderly before pushing it live.
Remember to Keep an Eye on Your Analytics
Ensure Google Analytics and Google Search Console are installed to track user behavior and monitor the performance of your website. Use this data to make informed decisions and continually optimize your site monthly or quarterly to best tune its performance and reach. Monitoring is very important to the long term success of your new design.
Remember that web design is an in depth process. It requires time, money and energy to craft an award winning website. Make sure you can dedicate the necessary resources to make the new website a success. The better the planning, the longer the lifespan of the website. If you need guidance, consultation or ideas about a redesign, contact us today.
