Website Design: Key things to think about

There’s so much to think about when designing a brand-new website, such as writing content marketing, choosing a website hosting company, and creating a memorable and well-designed company logo. There are a million and one things to think about, so you do need to hire designers who walk you through the process and help you think about each part of the web design so that, in the end, you end up with an awe-inspiring, well-designed website.

A quick word on SEO

A lot of businesses hire us because, quite simply, we have fantastic SEO consultants. Website design is often just one of the services the company hires us to design. Then, just as the website is finished, the company sometimes hires us for ongoing work, such as improving the company’s organic and local SEO.

Therefore, if your business is going to use SEO to generate more customers, you have to pay attention to the following when designing the website:

– You need a fast website, so you’re going to need fast hosting
– Well-written content marketing
– Content marketing is written with Google E-EAT in mind
– White hat SEO must be applied

So, how do you create a well-designed company website that stands out from the crowd?

We believe you shouldn’t skim and save on a website. Sure, many web designers offer cheap prices, but as the old saying goes, you often get what you pay for. Usually, the website will look cheap, essential, and thrown together, and because of that, your customers won’t get the wow factor; they may click off the website and visit a competitor’s website.

Think about colour schemes

The first thing a shopper will see is the colour scheme of your new website. Have you opted for black and gold, producing a luxurious feeling across the website? Have you opted for white and a lot of spacing to make the site feel less cluttered? Have you chosen a bright colour scheme that sticks in your mind and produces memorable company branding?

Designing a good company logo is very important.

A company logo is not just a company logo; it should be eye-catching and memorable. You should be able to recognise that logo. If you see it on a company van, shop front, or a website, you should instantly be able to identify it. Many company logos today are not that memorable; you might forget about them quickly after you have seen them.

So, instead, you need a well-designed, unique company logo.

Many web design agencies, including ours, don’t include logo design within their quote for a new company website. That’s because sometimes it takes many hours to design a company logo. Often, the logo has to go through many revisions, so this is why many web designers, including ours, charge separately to design a company logo for a business.

Spend time creating a well-designed main menu.

Have you ever been on a website that looks amazing and well-designed, yet when you use the main menu, it’s challenging, and you can’t find the products you want? Instead, finding the right page and the product you tried to buy takes longer than you wanted.

You might even get annoyed that you can’t find the right product, so you leave the website, which increases the bounce rate.

A high bounce rate can cause business to drop in Google’s ranks. So, for example, let you run a website that sells car parts, and there’s a section that sells car exhaust systems. Now, if the exhaust section of the website has a very high bounce rate, many shoppers are landing on that page and leaving quickly.
This means that Google will know that the page has a very high bounce rate and may decide to rank it lower in Google’s SERPs.
Therefore, offering a good user experience is essential when designing your company website.

Here are some of the areas you may wish to consider to offer your customers a better U.X

– A main menu that’s simple to use
– The website should be fast
– A homepage designed to take a shopper to a page as quickly as possible; for example, if you’re an electrical retailer, and the main selling item is fridge/freezers, you should have a picture of a large fridge freezers customers can click on
– Make the mobile version of the website well designed, simple to use
– Use split testing to reduce the business bounce rate gradually

Good photographs

So, let’s say you run a dental practice. Customers want to see pictures of your staff and the inside of the practice. This will instantly give them a sense of what your business is like.

Therefore, hire web designers who offer good photography so that they can design a website that instantly communicates what your business offers. A good slider on the homepage could show the inside of the business premises, the principal dentist, and perhaps an award you have won. This is great. Complement this with well-written content marketing, and shoppers are likely to want to spend longer on your company website, reducing the bounce rate and perhaps increasing conversions.

Typography

A boring font can mean a shopper doesn’t want to read the font longer. A boring font may deter the shopper from reading another page, yet a good font can say something about your business; if it’s a modern font, a nice Google font, then this can enhance the website, combine this with a good company logo, good well-written content marketing, and this can make a website look much better, increasing the dwell time, that’s how a shopper spends on the website.

So, when choosing a font for your new company website, think about the following:

– If you are a business that wants modern branding with bright colours, go with a more contemporary font; ask and make sure with your web design company that the font works across multiple different browsers
– If you run a more traditional business, such as a solicitor’s practice, choose a more conventional font.

Mobile Friendliness

So, whether it’s an e-commerce website or perhaps a brochure website for a local business, the website must be mobile-friendly. It must be responsive and work on Apple iPhones and Google’s (Alphabet’s) Android operating system.

Your company website must be mobile-friendly, but you also need to hire web designers to create a well-designed mobile version. It should be simple and fast, so ask your designers about designing an accelerated mobile page for your business.

Make sure that you own a fast company website

Your company website should be fast

How fast is your company’s website?

So, we highly recommend using GTMetrix or Google’s tools to see how fast your company website is. Google will use how fast your company website is as a ranking factor, meaning you can rank higher if you have a super-fast website. However, with that said, Google’s algorithms will use over 200 ranking factors to determine how vital your business’s SEO is and how fast your company website is just one of these ranking factors.

However, talk to any good web designer, and they will tell you that to lower your business bounce rate, you often need super-fast hosting, and the website needs to be fast.

So, when hiring a web designer, choose a business that offers fast hosting.

We offer our clients free hosting for the first year, another reason so many people hire us to design their websites.

The colour scheme

It’s really important to think for a long time about which colours you want to use for your new website. It’s often popular to go with a white background and keep the design simple so that the page doesn’t look overly cluttered.

However, a new company starting up might be operating in a very competitive business sector, so it may want to stand out and create very distinctive branding. Therefore, the branding needs to be different, perhaps using bright colours and a really well-designed company logo, and therefore, the company branding becomes memorable.

So, therefore before you even hire a web designer, you might want to get a set of company brand guidelines created.

Sometimes, a different company is hired to do this work, and you can create a company logo, choose different fonts, and create a colour scheme. Then this can massively help your web developers because, instead of having to spend time with clients discussing colour schemes and hex codes, they will know which colours to use and can start to design the website.

The brand guidelines should, therefore, stipulate the following:

– Which hex codes should be used
– What the company logo should look like
– Also to state which fonts should be used, such as font size for titles and a different font for the main paragraphs
Regardless of which CMS you choose, the brand guidelines will be super helpful to your web designers. If you choose WordPress or Drupal, you can select the right font and the company logo and start to design the website according to the brand guidelines. So, before you hire a web designer, we recommend hiring the same company to create a set of brand guidelines or simply hiring a marketing agency to develop a set of brand guidelines for you.

How you want the homepage to look

The homepage must be well designed, and your web developers, whether the site is made using Drupal or Joomla or, let’s say, WordPress, that the homepage is well designed. The homepage is often the page which gets the most views, so you want the bounce rate to be low, you want the dwell time to be high, you want to have CTA on the page so that you gain the customer’s e-mail address and phone number so that you can increase your business’s chance of making a sale.

How much you’re willing to spend

So, the cost of a website can increase sharply when you start adding different functionality. For example, you may want an AMP version of the website, you may want to hire copywriters to do the work, you may want to hire a photographer for the day, or you may want to hire an SEO company. So often, a lot of different staff will be needed, and therefore, the cost can increase.

So, having an obvious idea about your budget would be best. Then, you should allocate your marketing budget to cover your web design and copywriting and work on improving the business’s search engine optimisation. The reason we say that is simple: You could splash all of your marketing budgets on getting a website designed and then not have any money left to promote the business, say, on social media or to improve the company’s organic SEO.

So, sit down from the outset and make sure you allocate enough money to cover what you want to spend to promote your business.

How you want the mobile version of the website to look

We highly recommend that you get a well-designed responsive version of the website when you hire a web developer. This is because more and more shoppers buy services and products on mobile phones. So, make sure your company website is mobile-friendly, simple to use, and offers a good U.X.

Text: Will you write the text or be a copywriter?

So, when you think of a 10-page website, let’s say a brochure website, if you were to add all of that text into one Word document, it could be thousands upon thousands of words. This would take the business a very long time to write. Sometimes, the directors or company employees would not have the time to write all of the business’s text.

This is why they hire copywriters. Some web design businesses employ copywriters directly, and some use external copywriters. Regardless of which copywriter writes the text, it must be of good quality and written with Google E-EAT in mind. That means that the text must show experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The work must be well written.

Social media accounts

So, when the web developers are designing your website, often they will need to know which social media accounts, such as Elon Musk’s X, formally known as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, which social media accounts your business will be using.

Then, the web developers can add the social media account buttons to the header, and perhaps you want these added to the footer as well. What they do is allow a shopper to go straight to your business’s social media accounts. They may wish to follow your company before they make a purchase. This is your business’s opportunity to then advertise to the shopper about new products and your company’s services.

Contact forms

Adding a contact form to each main page is a good idea, making it super simple for a shopper to ask a quick question. For example, you may sell cars, and the customer may send a quick question, such as enquiring whether air conditioning comes standard; this then presents an opportunity for a sales staff to call customers to help them further. This may result in a sale; otherwise, if you didn’t add a contact form on that page where the customer could quickly ask a question, the shopper may have just left without asking your business a question.

How many pages do you require?

This is important to work out at the beginning of the web design process. It helps the web design agency form an accurate quote. What can sometimes happen is that the customer states they want a 7-page website, but when you sit down and plan how you want the website designed, you might actually need to double that number of pages. Therefore, the initial web design quote will increase in price.

Therefore, to get an accurate cost for a web design company to build a brand-new website, you must know how many pages need to be designed. We recommend using a large whiteboard. Start with the essential pages, such as the homepage, about us page, and contact us page, then write which other pages you need and create a site map. This will help you contact your web design company and state how many pages you need to design.

Your web developer will find the site map very useful; it will help to set out the pages. Using that layout, they can design the main menu in WordPress. It will also help the web design agency get back to you with a quote much quicker because some businesses only require a one-page website, whereas some solicitors may need a 25-page brochure website built. Therefore, the quotes for WordPress website design will be very different.

One of the first questions a web design agency often asks when you call them to get a brochure or e-commerce website built is, “Do you know how many pages you need?” This gives the business a very rough idea of how much work is needed to design your new company website.

Site map

We highly recommend that you add a site map to your new company website and regularly update it.

We recommend adding a site map to your company website to help Google index new pages. This can help improve your business’s search engine optimisation by getting Googlebot to index all of the blog posts on your site, so that if there are any improvements made to the pages, Google will pick up on this.

Cookie Policy

You will need to add a cookie policy to your website. Your web designers can help you with this. Often, a link to this page is added to the footer.

How we can help:

We have been designing quality, well-built websites for a wide range of businesses based in Cardiff. We offer very affordable prices and aim to turn websites around as quickly as possible.

If you would like to obtain a quote for our SEO services or web design, then why not call us today. So if your looking for a website design company why not call us?