Why should you ensure your website is up to date?
Let’s be honest, nobody likes interacting with a poorly designed website. Your website is often one of the first points of contact between you and potential clients, and therefore it’s a reflection of your brand. This means it’s crucial that you’re providing a positive first impression!
To try and address some common problems, we’ve created a quick guide that highlights a few key things that should be taken into consideration when developing or updating your website.
Purpose
Before you even begin to redesign your website, you should have a clear idea of its purpose. Build a picture of what type of person is most likely to visit your website.
Why are they visiting? What appeals to them?
By building a pen portrait of your target consumer you can begin to tailor the design of your website around them. If it’s a B2B client, then generally the website should be highly functional and professional, whereas B2C websites that are geared towards the younger generation may have a more innovative layout and more scope to incorporate fun features and graphics.
You should also think about what the aim of the website is. Is it to raise awareness of your brand or is it to facilitate purchases? These are important points to raise because they may influence how your website is laid out. You need to think about what you want the client to see when they first land on your website and the steps that you want them to take after they reach this point.
Functionality
Once you’ve decided on the purpose, the next step is to ensure that your site is functional and user-friendly. It should be extremely straightforward for potential customers to navigate through your website and find the products that they are searching for. For example, if you were an e-commerce site, but your checkout process was too complicated for the customer to understand, this could be disastrous, and lead to you losing the sale.
Similarly, it’s imperative that your website is mobile and tablet-friendly. As people gradually shift more and more away from conventional PCs and laptops towards mobile devices, lack of website adaptability is a common issue that we see here at DNRG. You can’t simply design a website for a desktop layout, and then scale content down for smaller screens. Instead, you need to ensure you are creating content that can be adapted to fit different types of screens, and bear in mind the limitations that this brings for certain devices.
Consistency
Consistency is another common area of website design that is often overlooked. Some of the most successful websites have a strict colour theme and stick with this throughout. This also applies to characteristics such as the font used, repetition of your logo, and ensuring that the menu buttons and call to action buttons appear on each page. It can be good to match the theme of your website to your logo because this can help to reinforce your branding and give your website a strong identity.
These are just a few points that should be taken into consideration when thinking about website design. At DNRG, our web team is highly experienced in all aspects of web design and can assist you in building a website from scratch, or just giving it a facelift. If you’d like to find out more about our web design services please don’t hesitate to get in contact.
