here’s some tips to creating the perfect website:
Strategize Your Brand
The first task you have is to devise a detailed
branding strategy. You don’t want to start creating a
website before you have a solid idea of the site’s purpose,
its intended audience, its guiding visual philosophy or its tone of
voice. All of these should become clear to you as you pursue the
following:
Identify your target market: Who are they?
Which demographic groups do they belong to? What do they like to do?
How do they see themselves? How will your business or website
influence their lives?
Research your competitors: Get a grip on what
the competition is doing, what their strengths and weaknesses are,
and how you can carve a niche for yourself in the field.
Define your brand identity: If you had to
describe your brand in three words, what would they be? What is the
vision that motivates your brand? Think of your brand’s personality
and extract from it tangible traits like colors, vocabulary and
style.
Prepare consistent branding material: Now it’s
time to get practical and prepare the materials that will soon be
featured on your site and on other platforms too. For instance, a
logo, images, slogans, videos, textual content and more. They should
all correspond to your brand identity and serve yourbranding
strategy.
Approach the Design
When it comes to the web design itself, you’re in
luck. Wix does most of the hard work for you, and all that is left is
for you to choose what’s right for your website’s style.
Choosing a template: Website templates give you
a solid foundation for designing your site. Ideally, the template you
choose already has the layout you need and is styled according to
your branding strategy. Wix offers a vast selection of gorgeous
website templates for multiple themes, styles and purposes. Take
a look, take your time and choose the one that best suits your
vision.
Customizing your template: Once your heart is
set on a template, it’s time to turn it into your very own site by
customizing and editing: adding your own content (images, texts,
links, videos, audio) and refining the design if needed (colors,
shapes, page order, font choice and more). Your customizing can be as
basic or as elaborate as you want it to be. Take a look at this
gallery of Wix websites created from three templates and
you will see how Wix users make our templates look like
individually-designed sites.
Tweaking the look: There is much more to
creating a website than just choosing images and colors. You can add
a variety of features that will enhance your site design,
like parallax scrolling to add dimensionality to your
site, background videos that inject dynamic motion, wide
strips to accentuate the page layout and so much more.
Prioritize Usability
Your website, as stunning as it is, must also
provide a friendly user experience to your site visitors. A beautiful
website that does not function properly will not get you far. As you
create your site, pay attention to these important points:
Navigation flow: Make sure the site structure
is clear and intuitive so that visitors can easily navigate
between pages and subpages using the main menu or internal links.
Content hierarchy: A coherent content hierarchy
guides the visitors through your site content in the order that best
serves your interest. The most crucial aspects should be the most
prominent, and the design should clearly reflect that. This landing
page site is a pretty good example of content hierarchy done
right.
Call to Action: CTAs are the messages that invite
site visitors to take direct action, like: “Register Free” or
“Get Yours Today.” In short, they tell the visitors explicitly
what it is that you want them to do. Learn how to create the
perfect CTAs before you add them to your site.
Readability: What’s the point of having a website
if your content is practically unreadable? Make sure you use
clear fonts and comfortable font sizes, that your text colors
contrast well with the background colors, and that you have enough
“white space” around your texts.
Footer: The bottom part of your site is known as the
“footer” (the top is the “header”). Footers are not
immediately visible to site visitors, but they can be used in a
number of ways to enhance usability, for example: add all of your
content information there, including buttons linking to social media
channels; display a simplified site map that links to all pages of
the site; write a brief About Us paragraph, or a site disclaimer
text.
Prepare for Search Engines
Getting your site to rank prominently on search
results is one of the most valuable ways to increase your traffic,
which is why it’s so important to incorporate Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) already when you create your site. Within online
marketing, SEO is a science in its own right and its key elements
are:
Keyword research: Put yourself in the shoes of your
potential site visitor or client. What will they be searching on
Google that should lead them to your website? The keywords that they
will be using are the ones that will guide your SEO strategy. Make an
informed decision on which keywords you should be
targeting.
Text: Your Bio section, your blog, your footer, your
FAQ section – every spot that has text should be conceptualized
with SEO in mind. The real trick is to find a subtle and elegant way
to integrate your keywords into your site’s textual content without
compromising your content’s quality. Search engine crawlers are
smart and if they think you sound too much like an ad, they will
down-rank you.
Meta tags: Meta data is not plainly visible to
your site visitors. Search engines, however, do read your meta data,
and you can control what it is that they see and how they present
your site in search results. Follow this guide to understand how to
use meta tags to your advantage.
Alt Text: Search engines can’t read images
but that doesn’t mean that images are useless for SEO. Every image
that you upload to your website should have an ‘Alt Text’ added
to it. This very short line explains to search engines what the image
depicts, which in turn allows your images to be ‘found’ in search
results. Here are more alt text guidelines for you to
follow.
Link Building: Broadly put, your search results
ranking improves if you have other websites linking to your site. You
can start by submitting your website to directories, making sure that
all of your social media profiles point to your site, and encourage
site visitors to share your content as well.
