Wondering how to make your website better and stronger? Here is a list of best website design practices to ensure you have a better, stronger website with a great user experience.
The digital arena is continuously changing and evolving, and this is a known fact. Something useful or popular in the recent past can quickly become obsolete, and the same holds for your website.
Your priority as a website owner is to keep your site content informative and desirable and your target audience and visitors as engaged as possible. But it can be a real challenge to do this if your website isn’t up to par with your users’ wants and expectations. It is website murder to not regularly upgrade your content, and you are risking becoming irrelevant and stale if you don’t take matters into your own hands. But it doesn’t have to come to this if you know what you can do to freshen and liven up your website. Here, then, is a list of best website design practices for you to have a better, more robust website in 2023.
Should you update it?
The foremost question is whether or not you should update your business website. Is it worth updating it by going for a full-on redesign, or should you focus on some minor adjustments here and there? For most website owners, the answer is a few simple updates – but to be sure, ask yourself a few questions, such as:
- Does my website design look and feel dated?
- Has my business sales suffered a recent downward trend?
- Is it possible to increase or enhance my business website results by investing in better photography for my products or offering a better user or visitor experience?
- Can my brand and business benefit from more website pages, like an online shop or blog?
If your answer to any of the above questions is yes, you may want to invest in slight upgrades to make your site more valuable and relevant.
Your list of best web design practices
Use this list of best website design practices to ensure you have a better, stronger website with a great user experience.
01. Assess and review your existing design and content
You can begin by assessing and reviewing your existing design and content and giving your site a complete evaluation. You’re not coming up with new things or content just yet – you’re simply trying to figure out the aspects that work for your site – and the aspects that don’t. By doing this, you can have a more straightforward list of whatever details you need to tweak.
Your review can consist of assessing your visual website content. Are your videos and images high in quality and relevant? If anything appears blurry, outdated, or pixelated, it may be time to change it. If you have images that no longer align with your brand’s identity, you should remove these or edit them as well. Aside from the visuals, assess your written site content. Be particularly mindful of links that are broken, as well as incorrect or missing information.
02. Review the data of your site
Once you have surveyed your business website, look at your site’s analytics. By doing so, you can better analyse the behaviour of your audience and then start tailoring your website to suit their wants and needs. You can integrate tools for tracking and analytics to monitor traffic to your site, and with this, you will be able to see which site pages get the most traffic and the amount of time your visitors stay on your pages and get a better idea of your site’s bounce rates.
This gives you a better insight into your visitors’ behaviour – and then you can start analysing why they do what they do. If many of your site visitors end up leaving a particular page without trying to engage, think about what makes that page different. Perhaps it has too much text, or it may take a longer time to load. If you have a better perspective on your site’s data, you can make better decisions regarding your website updates.
03. Enhance your website media features and elements
Even if your site has the most interesting and highest quality site content, if it doesn’t look professional enough, then it just wouldn’t work. The first impression always counts, and even if your visitors can’t find the info they want at first glance, but your site is appealing, they will likely stay longer.
That said, ask yourself this: is your site aligned with core design principles? You may also want to integrate various visual features and elements to make your site ‘pop’ and become instantly memorable to your audience. Think about how you can edit, add, or update your media elements and features for your site, from sound to images to videos and animations. The good thing about having an existing website is that some of your pictures or videos and photos may need some editing, and a company experienced in excellent web design such as Expre can help you with your editing and refurbishing needs as well. Here’s another tip: you can add a more dynamic appeal to your site by transforming your current images or videos into more professional ones using a video editor. You can add music, text, and various other unique effects to develop more engaging site content that your audience will appreciate.
04. Don’t forget existing trends
As mentioned, website design is constantly changing, so there will always be some new trends that you may want to consider for your site. You don’t have to be a pro to know what these trends are – all you have to do is keep an eye on the sites of your competitors and see if they have made changes to their websites, like a prominent video, more pages, and so on.
I’ve been using Cloudways since January 2016 for this blog. I happily recommend Cloudways to my readers because I am a proud customer.
You can also find out more about which trends are up and coming by reading blog posts and magazines about design updates and trends. Check out topics that include graphic design, UI design, illustration, animation, typography, and more. With these, you can have a more solid understanding of what’s happening in the digital world and perhaps even apply these new elements to your site to give it a more contemporary, trendy feel.
