Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Web Design

When you design a website or when you have one designed for you, this is a complex process with many different aspects to consider. What makes it so complicated is that it is part 'art' and part creative expression, but also partly a 'science' and one that needs to be considered from a business perspective. Balancing these aspects so that you have something that looks nice, and that you're happy with, but that at the same time will convert visitors into customers is tricky and it's where a lot of people trip up.

What's easy to do is to get caught up in making a website that's beautiful and 'snazzy' and that you're proud of so that you forget you're also supposed to be making money from it. Making a website is just too fun and exciting for many of us. Here then are a few questions you should remember to ask yourself during the process to make sure that it will work as part of your business. Remember business?

What do you want to be the first thing your visitors do?

When you ask a lot of webmasters this they will look back at you blankly and then realise that they don't really have an answer. If your website is full of different things all vying for attention, then it's going to be very hard for visitors to know where you should look and they may even leave as a result. It's called 'options paralysis'.

Instead of thinking of your site as a sprawling amusement park of wonders then, instead think of it as a funnel so that your visitors go in one end and then get directed through it all as you want them to be. This might mean that you get them to sign up to the mailing list, or it might mean that you get them to right away read you marketing spiel/landing page. Whatever it is, try to lead them by the hand and try to avoid unnecessary distractions.

Is it touch friendly?

Making your site fit lots of different resolutions is old news and everyone knows how important this is. However what you also need to ask yourself is whether it's going to be usable on touch screens. More and more consumers are now browsing the web not only on their phones, but also on their tablet devices and touch screen computers. If you want to take advantage of these huge chunk of the market, then you need to make sure that your site is appropriately laid out.

Is it optimized for Google?

A site is pretty much useless without visitors, and you need to think right from the offset about how people are going to get there. If your site is full of adverts, or if it isn't well interconnected, then this will make it less likely to get indexed by Google. Likewise if it uses headers in images this too will prevent Google from indexing those parts. Make sure then that your site is optimized for Google right from the start and discuss it with your web designers.

Saini David works at Bonsai Media, for more information about their products and services click here