So, you want to design the best website, or have someone design it for you, right? This is a hefty task because having a piece of digital real estate on the Internet will put you on a huge playing field! Statista reported 1.72 billion websites online as of August 2019. With this many websites, it would take nearly 55 years to view them all for only one second each! Let’s face it, the number of websites is growing—so it would take even longer than that to view them all—and I am fairly certain you don’t have that kind of time on your hands!

What will your website say about you?

There’s no shortage of people who can slap up a website and call it done, but how many can design a quality website that will do its job and do it well? You want someone who can design the best website, right?

You wouldn’t send out poor quality brochures to clients or prospective clients—nor would you hand them a shoddy-looking business card—why then would you advertise a poorly-made website? With a website, you are essentially trading older advertising and networking methods for a newer one. You want to make the first impression a good one, and you want people to keep coming back for years to come. A sloppy website is NOT what you want! You must find someone who can design the best website possible for your brand. To accomplish that, you’ll want to have a basic understanding about what’s needed.

Design the Best Website: Website Elements to Consider

Here’s a list of elements you’ll want to consider when building any website; especially if you want to design the best website.

Color Coordination of Your Website

First, you want a maximum of three main colors. Then, you can utilize varied tints of these colors. Selecting the proper color palette is important as you want things to match, and you want the colors to be pleasing to the eyes of your visitors.

Graphics of Your Website

In addition to the color palette, you will want to be cognizant of the appropriateness of images you use on your website, as well as their quality. To begin with, you want clear, visually pleasing images that are pertinent to your content. Next, you also want to be sure they are not slowing your website down and impeding the user experience or your search engine results.

Content of Your Website

Content is King! You must have content that is relevant, well-written, pleasing to the eye, and engaging. Also, your content must aid in gaining you traffic from search engines; it must be SEO optimized. You cannot post subpar content and expect fantastic results. Additionally, you should continue to add fresh, SEO-optimized content on a regular basis.

Navigation of Your Website

Navigation should be one of your top priorities. If your website isn’t easy to navigate, people won’t stick around to delve into all you have to offer. No one wants to fight to find information, figure out how to order and checkout, or how to contact your company for assistance. Finally, your website should be given a test run by a few different users to get feedback once designed. Always remember, part of being able to design the best website is designing a site people will linger on, increasing their chances of doing business with your company.

Accessibility of Your Website

Accessibility is vital for any website. Don’t believe me? Lawsuits, including the one involving Bruce Maguire over the Sydney Olympics website, do occur. While this is not something that happens to most website owners, it can happen; the fines can be heavy. Therefore, use of ALT tags on images help describe them for those who have visual impairments is one way to increase accessibility. Also, text-based links should be used where possible. For more information how accessibility can help you design the best website possible, visit http://www.w3.org.

Search Engine Optimization of Your Website

You did it! You figured out how to design the best website! Your website is ready, full of engaging content, beautifully designed, fully accessible, and ready to hit the superhighway. Great! Now, how will people find you? This is where something called SEO comes into play (Search Engine Optimization). Around here, we lovingly say we aim for “search engine magnetism.” Optimizing your website for the primary search engines can aid in bringing free, targeted traffic to your new website. Without being overly technical and making you dizzy, we’ll explain a bit more; a small percentage of the basic rules for SEO are discussed below.

Design the Best Website: Basics of SEO

Still with me? It’s time to talk about a few basics of SEO! You can’t design the best website without great SEO!

1. Using a good TITLE TAG. First off, utilizing the keywords you want to rank for within your title, and as your page or post “slug” is a good SEO practice. Here’s an example: say you want to rank your company website among plumbing results, are located in Euless, Texas, and you are covering Fort Worth customers as well. Your TITLE TAG may be “Plumbers in Euless Plumbing Fort Worth” or something similar. Having your main keywords in your TITLE TAG can quickly improve your chances of a higher search engine ranking. For an added boost, use keywords in your domain name as well, such as “FortWorthUsedCarSales.com” or something of that nature.
2. KEYWORDS within your website. The percentage of times keywords appear (keyword density) doesn’t seem to affect results the same as it once did, but a good general rule has typically been to be sure the keywords you want to rank for comprise roughly 1-2% of your copy. Overuse is commonly referred to as “keyword stuffing,” which can harm more than help your SEO efforts.
3. LINKBACK Requests. Making requests for other sites to link back to yours has been a common SEO practice that still works; this is called backlinking. Search engines, especially Google, prioritize rankings based on the number of websites linking to yours. Not all backlinks are created equally, but that is somewhat of a long discussion to have on another post. Basically, the more “authority” a site linking to yours has, and the more closely their content relates to your content, the better. This increases the value of the backlink in the eyes of the all-mighty search engines.
4. Increase Internal Links. Linking to your own content from page to page, or even on the same page in the case of long-form content, is smart. This is a great way to tell the search engines more about your content and help establish a hierarchy for your content. It may also tell search engines you are concerned with the convenience of your visitors. Internal links signify a better user experience because you are helping your visitors find what they want more efficiently.
5. Stay Honest and Be Patient. When it comes to SEO, the biggest rule of all is be patient and avoid what is called “Black Hat” SEO. It can easily take up to a year—or more—to achieve your desired ranking in Google. This is especially true for popular phrases with lots of competition. However, it can take less time to rank on other search engines such as Bing, Ask, YouTube (yes, this is a search engine!), and so forth. Anyone promising you superfast results is likely using Black Hat techniques that will get your site penalized by search engines. Search engine penalties will not help your business grow a larger audience! Build your SEO plan solidly and safely, avoiding questionable tactics at all costs!

Final Thoughts on How to Design the Best Website

We hope you will keep this advice in mind when it comes time for your website to be born. If you want to design the best website, or perhaps have one designed for you, we at ADRA are here to help in any way we can. Feel free to contact us here.

By sticking to the general principles outlined above, you will have a website you can be proud of. Over time, with consistent efforts, your website will evolve into valuable digital real estate. This isn’t Field of Dreams; you can’t simply build your website and expect people to come. A website is an investment of money, time, effort, and more. If you are a serious investor, you will eventually stake your claim on the World Wide Web by staying the course.