Website Design Criteria

Review your website with the following factors in mind:

• Site speed – Do your pages load quickly? Website speed plays an important part in providing a good user experience. If your website speed is pitifully slow, then your conversion rates will most likely to be the same. On average, if your website takes longer than five seconds to load, a high percentage of visitors will abandon their visit
• Responsiveness – is your site responsive? Responsive design can help you solve a number of problems for your website making it mobile-friendly, improve the way it looks on devices with both large and small screens. This can help increase the amount of time that visitors spend on your website and help towards improving your rankings in search engines
• Branding – does your website reflect your brand? Your website design elements, like fonts and typography, colours, images, etc. all form your brand identity. Therefore, you need to choose those elements carefully and keep them consistent across your website ( as you should across al of your marketing / promotional materials)
• SEO – are you performing well on search engines? The following two articles Web marketing SEO and the top 19 benefits of SEO cover this in detail
• Competition – are you outperforming competitors or are your competitors outperforming you? We have seen numerous examples where the competitor has a poorer ( but adequate product or service offering) but portrays themselves in a better way online. They get the enquiries, whilst the vastly superior company is dismissed because their website makes them look second class
• Conversion rate – are you converting leads/customers? The conversion rate in its simplest form can be considered as what percentage of visitors who land on the site take the desired action. Ultimately we want to identify and improve the percentage who land on the site end up ultimately purchasing

If your site isn’t performing effectively for most of these website design criteria factors and you are not getting the required results, then it may be worth considering a website redesign.

Do you need a new website, website redesign or changes to your website?

If you think that you need changes to your existing website, a website redesign, or a new website, then make sure that you consider the following factors before you commence.

Discuss each one of the elements with marketing, technical digital marketing and web designer to ensure that any changes that you make to your website will have a positive impact. Over the last ten years we have encountered many companies where a website redesign causes the website to perform worse than its predecessor. Primarily because the focus has been on making the website “look prettier” rather than considering the complete website design criteria.

Who is your website for?

Who is your target audience? This is critical as you need to build the site that they need. This ties in with what is the purpose of your website, which we cover later in this article

Is your website communicating to

• Potential Customers / Leads
• Existing Customers / Members
• News / Media
• Staff / Internal Stakeholders
• Public
• Other

In our experience a single website will have to communicate to a number of different people for a number of different purposes.

For example You will want the site to be found by prospects and then help inform them and capture their details. Existing, returning customers should be able to see what’s new and see upsell / cross sell options. The media should be able to see dedicated information that will help them with their requirements

Once you know who your audience is, you can build personas for each segment and create a user journey around them. This will help you understand how they get to your site and how they will navigate it to reach your intended objective.

What does your target audience want?

If you have an existing website, evaluate your Google Analytics to establish how well the site is performing from a quantifiable perspective. Before you make any changes to your website its vitally important to take the time to understand your audience profiles and their online behaviour.

Website Design Criteria Tip:  Can you test some design options / changes on your current site before you change the entire site.

• You could achieve this by having a web designer create alternative landing pages for your marketing campaigns.
• By running A/B tests with your email or ad campaigns you could then evaluate which was more effective.
• Refine the page further by making minor alterations to the page’s Calls To Action (CTA) to understand what works for your target audience. (what works well for another site/ another industry – may have no impact with your customers)
• Once you’ve collected and analysed the data, this can be used to develop and build your optimised website.

Website Design Criteria Tip: Your website should be in-line with your company branding. All key messages that your audience would expect from interacting with your brand through any other marketing channel should be included.