Designing a website is a complex process with a lot of moving pieces. Similar to building a house, the process requires experts in different fields to collaborate on how to properly create a website that strategically meets your business needs.
If you’re considering a website redesign, you’ll want to consider these 5 major components that makes a successful website.
Strategy
Before you can begin to design or develop your website, you must start with a strategy. A great strategy involves framing (wireframing) to identify possible issues. Every organization may have a different goal, but the approach is always the same.
Go back to the building a house example. You wouldn’t begin to sketch the blueprints of a house without first knowing how many bedrooms and bathrooms you’ll want or need right? Like building a house, thoughtful research is the foundation of a user-centered website design and an essential part of creating a design that supports your users that will visit your site.
User Experience
User experience is about meeting the exact needs of your target users and creating a memorable interactive experience. Your strategies and goals when designing a website should be to create an enjoyable experience that gives your users what they want when visiting your website. This all beings with content. Understanding what your users are looking for and how they think about it.
Wireframes
Wireframes represent the strategy behind a layout. Wireframes can come in many forms. They can be sketched on a piece of paper or created in a program like Adobe Illustrator. Here’s an example of a hand-drawn wireframe I did for one of my web design courses.
Usability Testing
Testing is essential to the success of your website. Once the design phase is complete and published to a staging location, you’ll want to have a sample of users who will represent your target audience view and use your website. These users will help you determine if navigation is easy and does the content and call to actions work where they’re located.
Responsive Design
This phase is where you will finally see your project come to life. Once the design has been approved, a web designer will work with a front-end developer to discuss responsive layout.
Responsive web design is the concept of designing and developing a website with flexible layouts that respond the screen size of the device your user is using.
Technology
Whether your website is three pages or three thousand pages, selecting the proper content management system (CMS) is a key component to ensuring the success of your website. A CMS will provide you with simple tools to create, modify, and publish content. Not all content management systems are the same and choosing the right CMS can prevent unwanted issues and allow your organization to focus on other aspects of the business.
Hosting
A good hosting plan is arguably the most important part of your web site. Without hosting, your website isn’t accessible by anyone. Hosting is a key component that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Selecting the right host and maintaining the environment will guarantee that your website will remain available and secure for the public to visit.
Marketing
Your website, regardless of how great you believe the design is, won’t do any good if you can’t drive and maintain traffic. There are plenty of options out there to market your website; from free to paid solutions. Whichever solution you decide to go with, just remember that marketing is just as important as the design, if you want to be found on the Internet.
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