The Do's and Don'ts Of Web Design

The design of your website can make or break your business, make sure you spend plenty of time getting it right before you go live.

Creating your website so that it looks nice is one thing, but creating your website so that it functions in all the ways it should is quite another. While there are many people who are able to create a website that works well without any help, there tends to be two major strands of do it yourself web design. There are those who understand the nuts and bolts of creating a functioning site, and there are those who have an artistic eye and want to create an aesthetically pleasing experience. Ideally, your website should always embody both of these qualities.

The best place to start is with a solid foundation. Whether you are creating a site yourself or you are asking a designer to do it for you, wire frames are the best way to make sure your structural and visual designs match up. You also need to consider the ways these two elements can work together to offer users an intuitive and smooth journey through your website.

Obviously, your website needs to give people the information they are looking for and make it easy for them to navigate from one page to the other. This means ensuring that everything on your site is clearly signposted. After all, there's no point in adding a fast, secure and easy payment system to your site, if users can't see it.

To make sure your designs are successful, it can be a good idea to employ some user testing before deciding on your final designs. User testing can help you find out whether people will be able to navigate your site, and which design elements they find difficult, unnecessary or even frustrating. While the days of ugly flash and neon graphics may be long behind us, there are still many sites who go for the 'more is more' approach, one that the majority of users find hard to stomach.

These days, it's also very important that when building any new website, you are taking search engines and their preferences into consideration. If you ignore this at the early stages, you are likely to find that a site redesign is in your near future, as ranking well in the world's biggest search engines is becoming ever more essential for businesses of all sizes. Considerations such as making sure your pages are correctly labelled and have enough content or ensuring it is easy for search engine spiders to crawl your site are extremely important and easiest to control in the design stage.

However, whether you decide to create your site yourself or you turn to a professional, ensure that you always keep your user at the front of your mind. Good SEO web design will incorporate the needs of the user as well as the search engine, so don’t let yourself get caught up in thinking achieving rankings means you need to neglect simple, user-friendly designs. Take plenty of time over your site, and you'll find the basic structure will serve you well for years - even if you frequently tweak or give it a surface redesign.