The Things You Need To Know When Creating Your Own Website
There are many things to be considered when creating a website and it also depends on what the purpose of the website is, and what do you want to achieve. No matter the nature of the site, there are, however, some rules that should be adhered to across the board.
Below we’ll dip into
- How to choose a domain name
- Researching your audience
- User friendly layouts
- Cross browser testing
- User testing
Choosing the appropriate domain/URL.
The first step of creating a website is choosing a domain name/URL. The advice here is the simpler the better. It’s also good to have your line of work in the web address. If your site is selling cups for example, you want the word ‘cup’ within the web address as opposed to some eloquent or cool sounding word that bears little relation to your business.
Knowing your target audience.
You can create the website the way you wanted, however, this does not guarantee your potential customer will like it. It’s important to thoroughly understand your market niche and design accordingly with your potential visitors in mind. For example, if you are promoting high end perfumes for women that are aged between 40-60, the graphic and copy writing of your website will be very much different from selling perfumes to teenagers. According to research, when visiting a website, people only spend less than 5 seconds to decide whether to continue browsing the website or looking for another site. And this all depends on if the website is ”catchy” enough.
Design visitor-friendly pages.
The lay out in your website should be as easy to use/understand as possible. Planning ahead is the key, only put down the links/buttons/header that you think is absolutely essential. Pull all your ideas together in your mind, visualise them just right, then hit that paper with your favourite pencil or pen. Think about your visitors here too – are they likely to think it’s great? Unfortunately it’s not how you like it. Is it usable and simple to find the required information? Accordingly, you’ll save wasted effort re-jigging the design every time you have a ‘oh, this might be nice’ idea.
Checking your website behaves right in all the web browsers out there.
Browser Compatibility is vital. If you don’t have this, all the work and sweat you put into your web design will be fruitless – what’s the point if your potential customers can’t find you, or when they do they can’t view your site properly. Firefox and Internet Explorer are the two big guns in terms of browser market share at the moment and you need to make your site work in both. You need to make sure your website can be found and work properly on both. It happens fairly frequently for a website that works fine on one, but breaks on the other. You don’t want a screwed up page popping up on your visitors’ screens, and if graphics are missing or worse due to browser incompatibility that could be the least of your worries.
User Testing.
To make sure your website functions properly, once the site is set up ready to go, ask your friends use different web browsers and search for it and see whether it’s easy and straight forward to find, if there is a problem, you can fix it right away rather than wait until the website comes to live because for some fussy customers, you only get one chance, they will not come back visit again if they had negative experience with the site.
Above are just a few of the many issues one needs to bear in mind when creating a new web page. However if you can follow my advice, you are not far from creating a professional website. Enjoy!
Need help with your business website design? Call us today, we’re happy to help you with your questions.
Lloyd Roberts 123 Web Design Bournemouth
123 Bournemouth Web Design