When you are planning to build a website, there are a few secrets to a successful website design you’ll want to consider. I’ll keep this straightforward. You should know what the needs of your business are, who your target market is, and then there’s all the technical and legal stuff. We’ll unpack this a bit now.

What are the needs of your business?

The first of the secrets to a successful website design is setting your expectations and knowing what you want out of your website. By knowing what your business needs are, you will be able to begin aligning the functional aspects of your website with those needs.

Will you offer items for sale on your website? If so, you will need a shopping cart, tracking, and some form of payment processing installed on your website. You may need to create accounts with an online payment processor such as PayPal or Stripe.

Will visitors be able to schedule appointments or make reservations on your website? If the answer is yes, you’ll need scheduling software installed to make this possible. I believe you see where I’m going with this. I won’t beat a dead horse. Let’s move on to a few more secrets to a successful website design, shall we?

Who is your target market?

Buckle up! I’m about to delve into one of the biggest secrets to a successful website design! Understanding who your exact target market is will help you streamline your website to make your visitors’ experiences seamless. The customer avatar you envision will need to provide you with basic demographic information such as age, gender, employment, location, and income, at very least.

This knowledge will provide you with a framework to examine customer behaviors and create a website that “speaks” to your target market most effectively.

Your end goal is making sure visitors to your website have a user-friendly zone in which to find the products, services, and/or content they are looking for. You want to be the solution they were seeking. You want their visits to convert into sales.

Without leads, you have no customers; without customer, you have no sales. Surely you can see why keeping your prospective customers in mind is one of the most important secrets to a successful website design. Let’s keep going!

How will your website look?

This is probably the part you’ve been waiting for. You want to know the technical secrets to a successful website design. There is so much involved, but I’ll give you some pointers!

Let’s talk aesthetics first. If you already have branding associated with your company, you’ll want to follow suit with your new website. If you haven’t been branding your company in any way, you should start with your website. Likewise, if your company is new, there is no better time than the present to develop your brand. Your website can help you do so.

Find an appealing color palette to use, one that is easy on the eyes of your future visitors. Have a professional logo designed if you don’t have one. You’ll want to gather high-quality, attractive pictures to use throughout your website as well.

Secrets to a Successful Website Design: How will your website function?

Next, you will want to consider layout and functionality. Your website layout should make navigation easy. If your visitors can’t easily find what they are searching for, they will quickly leave your site.

The easiest way ensure usability is to begin by creating a list of all intended content. From there, you can work on your layout and determine what tabs, subtabs, galleries, etc. you’ll need to effectively organize information. Keep the words “user-friendly experience” in mind as you start to plan out how you will organize your content.

There needs to be a hierarchy established for your content. This hierarchy is vital not only for your sanity and your visitors’ ease of use, but also to impress the search engines and gain a bit more favor with them. Remember, the secrets to a successful website design aren’t just about you and your visitors; search engines command their share of attention as well.

Will your website need special functions?

Each website has a unique purpose. An ecommerce website needs far more capability than a simple blog or landing page. You must be sure of the intent of your website and test different shopping carts, determine the safest payment processing, and more. In other words, work out what you will be using beforehand as much as possible and save yourself countless potential headaches from poor planning.

Do you have a checklist?

Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone, but one of our top secrets to a successful website design is this:

When piecing together the plan for each website, we use a helpful checklist.

The checklist covers things such as easy navigational structures, visual hierarchy and design consistency throughout the website, using corporate colors and browser-safe colors, and CSS style-sheet-based font formatting.

Our list also covers analysis of website page length and content, graphics and text grids, content analysis of page headers and footers. We make sure to check accessibility concerns analysis and W3C compatibility testing (check out our article here to see why this is important), and compatibility testing.

Finally, we look at font typefaces (Google fonts are heavy, for instance), typographical approach, text rendering, graphics elements planning, heading html tag use, and a few more secrets to a successful website design as well.

Wrapping Up the Secrets to a Successful Website Design

An online presence is a valuable tool for growing your company, but there will be frustrations along the way. Be sure you take precautions when venturing into digital real estate. There is plenty to consider: always keep your plans customer centric, understand legislation regarding websites, don’t forget the search engines have their own rules, and be sure you have your expectations in check.

ADRA Media Agency is here to help, we not only get our customers online, we help them thrive online. Many companies are willing slap up a website without regard to whether it is what you need, if you know how to use it, if you understand the power that is within your reach if you nurture your new website and help it grow, and so forth.

We don’t operate that way here! We are committed to not only designing a beautiful, user-friendly website for you, but also to helping you maintain it, rank it, and use it to grow your brand. The day your website is born is much like the day a baby is born, the journey is only beginning. We won’t leave you hanging, trying to figure out all the things alone. Contact us today!