Tips on website design

22 Replies Rob Boirun

A notepad and a pencilWeb redesigns can be a huge undertaking. There are many things to keep in mind as you approach redesigning your or another website. Here are some of the basics of good web design to help keep your focus where it belongs.

User Experience

At the forefront of any web redesign should be the overall user experience desired. How do you want people to interact with your website? What do you want them to take away from your website? These are just a few starter questions to ask yourself as you go about planning the redesign. The easiest thing to do in order to answer these questions is to think about what you like about your favourite websites and what you dislike.

Design Aesthetics

The best designs are often the simplest designs, and keeping things clean is more inviting than a cluttered page. Cohesiveness in design throughout the site is key here. The content delineates one page from the next; not a whole new pallet of colours. Clean, modern designs are also easier for the user, making them more likely to interact with information you have posted, whether through a blog post or messaging forums.

Ditch the Gimmicks

This is not the time to go overboard and incorporate everything you have learned in your experience with web design and cram it all into one page. Ditch the shadow boxes and the splash pages, and make your page more inviting by making it easy for users to use and interact with the site.

SEO Friendliness

Incorporating aspects of SEO into your site’s design and content is very easy to do, but it has to be done right. Everyone wants their web page to ping higher on search engine results, which is easily achievable. Just make sure you are not taking away from the site content at the same time.

Check the Coding

Finally launching the web page after a redesign can be both an exciting and nerve-racking experience. After all the work that was put in to choosing the colours and overall aesthetic look, as well as the content, you want the launch to go off without a hitch. Nothing dashes the excitement of a site launch than to spend most of launch day fixing broken codes. Before you make it public, check your coding. Then double check it just to be sure.

User experience, above all, is the most important element. Having a website that users can easily use will keep users visiting your site regularly and will keep new traffic flowing in regularly. Keep the user experience in mind, and all the other necessary elements for good web design will fall easily into place.

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Written by Rob Boirun
An avid burner of DVD and Blu-Ray masterpieces. My main hobby is to create movie discs of my video and photos.

22 thoughts on “Tips on website design”

  1. John

    Web design is very important as it gives the first impression about the website. Many website owners rehash the web design on a regular basis. One of the greatest mistakes, as you said above, is trying to fit in everything in one page. I think this greatly reduces the user friendly experience.

    Reply
  2. Jenni@affordable web design for small business

    Think you missed an important element off the list that being engaging content.

    Yes the design of a website is very important, and I certainly agree with all of your points, however the best design in the world won’t achieve its objectives unless it has worthwhile content.

    I know its hard for web designers to “enforce” this, as often the customers provide the copy, but I really feel the two go hand in hand.

    Reply
    • Christopher (admin team)

      That is a good point Jenni, although if you follow Rob’s steps, nodoubt your content will become engaging 🙂

      Thanks for your comemnt, welcome to Technology Bloggers!
      Christopher – Admin Team

      Reply
  3. Jean @ Used Tires

    Great points, Rob. Ease of reading and navigation for the reader is of primary importance over everything else in my opinion too. I always think of the example of Facebook and Myspace. Facebook was simple but effective whereas Myspace was too overly complicated and I would have to almost relearn my way around everytime I visited someone’s page. And in the end, Facebook came out on top.

    SEO friendliness is also very important for sure. For example, making sure to use HTML instead of flash since Google can’t read flash and will skip over your text if you use flash only.

    -Jean

    Reply
    • Christopher (admin team)

      Interesting comments there about the SEO stuff Jean. My way of doing things is get a great site first, then, if you need to, do SEO.

      Thanks for your comment, welcome to the commenting community, here at Technology Bloggers!
      Christopher – Admin Team

      Reply
  4. Aaron @ Goa Holiday

    Hi Rob,

    Great points, I feel it’s always important to build a website which has been appreciated by users for its easy navigation and attractive design too. Plus adding SEO prospective gives more value to rank in search engines.

    Reply
  5. Jane@Problogging Action Plan

    One should say that a user friendly website is the best designed website. A simple design will take less time to load than a fancy one. Most users do not wish to visit a website which takes a huge time to load. The star of any successful website is its content and simplicity.

    Reply
    • Christopher (admin team)

      That is a good point Jane, simple sites often load quicker, although there are ways to speed up even very busy sites 🙂

      Thanks for the interesting comment, welcome to the Technology Bloggers community!
      Christopher – Admin Team

      Reply
  6. Chadrack@SEO Tips

    Hi Rob,

    These days when many turn to wordpress for creating blogs only a few really cares about knowing anything about webdesign. But the fact is that with a good knowledge of web design working on a blog becomes a lot easier.

    Your article is really on spot. Must say the point about checking the codes is very important because I had a situation sometime ago when I had to pull the whole thing and had to do a whole lot of work! Thanks for the tips.

    Reply
  7. Mike @ dating tips 1

    I think creating something unique is the most important part of growing a site. Since wordpress is so easy to setup, it takes a little more than just good content to create a popular site. For one site i paid a programmer to create a widget that no one else in my niche had. It really helped to get me great links and allowed me to set myself apart form everyone else.

    Reply
  9. Darci@Enterprise IT Security

    I agree with all of these tips. Aesthetics, checking coding and especially SEO. I think it’s important to remember that most of the time people are surfing the net looking for information. Something like 80% of all search queries are considered research queries. I take this to mean that the most important thing you can offer people as far as content goes is valuable, relevant and interesting information.

    Reply
  10. Samantha@Gardening Tools

    I’ve noticed that a site is more appealing to others if it has a better design. The more organized things are, the much easier for visitors to check the information they need. Since a simple design may also give the impression that the site is easy to navigate.

    Reply
    • Christopher (admin team)

      I know what you are saying Joe, I think you need a balance, some pics are needed to keep things lively, whilst too many can take ages to load!

      Thanks for the comment Joe, welcome to the community 🙂
      Christopher – Admin Team

      Reply

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