Web Design Essentials

If You Are Looking To Create An Effective Website Consider These Web Design Essentials

Five of the most important Web issues to consider

Creating an effective website i.e.  one that meets your business objectives and importantly satisfies the needs of your customers is a critical business activity. In this web design essentials article we will consider what we believe to be the top fifteen.

These include a wide range of technical and content characteristics from hosting through to domains, content to calls to action.

They are all important and hopefully this will provide an insight so that you can evaluate what is important for your business.

Website Hosting

Having just moved into new office accommodation, there is a great analogy between office space and website hosting. When renting an office space – you can DIY in a low quality area, or you can rent out an office in a nicer building with all the bells and whistles. For example at BBH we get a great restaurant, gym and meeting room and conference facilities

In simple terms just like your office, you need to rent space for your website to live!

Therefore you need to pay for space on a highly specialized computer server within a dedicated hosting facility.

As per getting your business an office directory listing ( for those of an older disposition think telephone directory / yellow pages). Equally your website has a physical address that maps the exact location of the website within a hosted server.

These physical addresses have their own 411 (or yellow pages directory), which is called Domain Name System (DNS). So now when you are working on your next website and technical boffin says “I need your DNS settings” you will know what there after.

The DNS directory is like a Global Positioning System (GPS) for your website, and shows the route between your site’s URL (the www address for example www.bdolphin.co.uk/) and the hosted servers location shown by their Internet Protocol (IP) address.

The IP address is a unique number that identifies the physical location of a computer in a similar way that a postal code tracks a physical office location.

The computers that host your website are called “web servers.” They are designed to work much more efficiently than a home computer (which is why hosting from home often results in lower connection quality). We use dedicated UK based WordPress Servers for all our WordPress websites which means they provide optimum performance

There are a number of different hosting types these includ:

• Free Web Hosting – (We would lump $10 hosting in this pot) as with all things you pays your money you take your choice
• Shared Web Hosting – there are many providers, the best offer response times that are 10 times better than the masses
• Managed Web Hosting
• Virtual Private Servers (VPS)Web Hosting – A virtual private server is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. The virtual dedicated server also works in a virtualized environment but some central processing cores are dedicated for it, which isn’t the case with VPS
• Dedicated Web Hosting – where just as the name suggests as a client you lease an entire server that isn’t shared with anyone else

Your Domain is a Web Design Essential

Choose a domain name that people can remember well. One of my favourites is www.diy.co.uk which is the domain for B&Q.

If you are a new business, you don’t yet a website or you are looking to have a new website then you will need to check that the domain is available.

There are a number of ways that you can buy a domain and all of these have a tool that allows you to check if the domain is available and with what prefix.

Initially there were only a few options available .co.uk for UK businesses, .com for international business, .gov for government departments and .org for charitable / not for profit organisations, University sites use .ac.uk – secondary educational institutions use .csch.uk

A few years ago there were a whole load of new prefixes made available

For example

• www.website.co.uk has already been registered – but
• www.website.market is available at ~ £2,800
• www.website.news is available at ~ £5,300
• www.website.properties is available at ~ £850
• other prefixes include .money , .supply , .net , etc

Your domain name will have an impact on your search engine optimisation performance. For example if your company name is Acme Ltd and you are a PCB Assembly Specialist. You were on the ball and purchased the domain www.acmeltd.co.uk and had your website built on this domain. Now times have moved on and you want to improve your sites organic ranking. Having a domain that incorporated pcbassembly.co.uk would be a definite advantage.

What Is The Purpose Of Your Website

A critical activity is to take time and think about the purpose of your website. Whether it’s simply an online brochure to provide a digital face for your business, a place for to educate and inform customers helping them to learn more. Or a transactional e-commerce site to take orders and payments, it’s important to make decisions and choices based on the overall purpose of your website.

If it’s mostly an online ecommerce store, you should build out the rest of your website with that in mind. For example

• How can you encourage more purchases? Up sell / cross sell / repeat sell are all elements that can be built into the process
• What design elements would help make customers’ purchasing decisions easier? Are all products well photographed, can an image be magnified, are there 360 degree image options. Are the product descriptions clear and concise. Are the checkout process and payment gateways super simple to use.
• If you’re more using your website as an online presence, what is it that customers come to your website to find out? It could be that you have a number of customer personas
  • Those at the early stage of the buying process who have very little idea about the subject matter. These need information, infographics, reports and how to videos
  • People who have an understanding of their issues and needs and are comparing your products and services to those of your competitors. These potential purchasers need to know why they should choose you
  • The person who has researched and is now ready to start the purchase process. An interesting point here is that you might have done a fabulous job online informing and educating. if when the person calls, nobody answers the telephone or gets back to the prospect then its all been a waste
• What questions are you answering for them and how can you best give them the information they want and showcase you as the expert? Would a technical report be better than an informational video. Would live online chat be more helpful than infographics or words
• How are you helping them get what they want and need more easily? Is it easy to find the content that a customer is looking for.

It is very important to keep your website’s purpose as a fundamental framework for the overall project as you move forward. We would suggest that website purpose is a number 1 in the web design essentials, linking directly with your business strategy.

Navigation and User Experience (UX)

It may seem obvious but make sure your website design is easy to navigate and understand. Customers should come to your website and not have to search forever to find where they want to go next. Your site navigation should be natural, common sense, and easy to understand.

For me the BBC website is a super example of common sense navigation. If you are being lazy and type in BBC, you are presented with a simple site that clearly showcases the key categories. So being a sports fan its really clear to see the sports tab, which I click and am now on the sports page. This has a detailed top menu with main sports, and blocks showing the very latest sports news items.

Importantly a search bar and uber menu are available so that I can easily search for that niche sports that is on topic. For me the site achieves brilliantly that visitors be able to easily find what they’re looking for.

The search bar provides an even better user experience, if none of the other navigation approaches are working. This is particularly useful when I want to go from the BBC  Northampton Town page  (come on the Cobblers) to the Archers radio show and using the search gets me there in one action.

As well as the header navigation don’t forget the your footer. A well designed footer can look impressive and also provide a key area for key business information such as

• Opening Hours – which is one useful for customers and two seen as important by Google
• Telephone number – in our opinion its really important to make it easy for customers to be able to easily contact you by phone
• Address – don’t just limit putting your address details to the contact us page
• Social Media Icons and Google my business icon
• Legal elements – links to your cookie policy, privacy policy and even your terms and conditions
• Vat Number and Companies registration – information that you are quite often asked for, or is required so showcase it in an easy to find, without being prominent

Make sure your website is Secure

User experience is a fundamental part of outstanding web design. The better the website experience, the better your website. To improve user web experience, your website should be secure, stable and reliable.

Visitors to your website should feel safe not only when visiting your website, but also when giving you their information. This could be a simple as filling in a simple contact form requesting name and email. Or a more detailed contact form requesting name, email, telephone, business details and their enquiry details. The ultimate is when you are asking them to provide personal details or when they need to supply credit card information or other sensitive details. This article covers key features essential for taking payments on your website and includes a useful checklist.

Following the Covid pandemic, online shopping has dominated in-person shopping, but people are still concerned about the safety and security of their sensitive and personal information. If you have an e-commerce site, then you will need an internet merchant account and a payment gateway account, which is an online credit card transaction processor. In fact, SSL is often required by most credit card networks. This is an essential step to making sure your website is PCI compliant and safe.

If you have a brochure site ( or non ecommerce transactional website), but still deal with confidential information, this is where SSL/Secure Certificate comes in. This is where you see a small padlock appearing next to the URL as opposed to having the wording Not Secure appear alongside the URL

SSL and Secure certificates provide security for your website by encrypting communications between the server and the person visiting the website. We believe it is so important for clients who host with us we offer free SSL certification as part of our website hosting.

For more information on web design essentials and having a website that will meet your business needs contact Blue Dolphin Business Development or call 01733 595502