Six Dos and Don’ts of Design Every Web Designer Should Know

Updated: 1/26/2022

If you have a business, you need a website. However, just having a website online is not enough to drive traffic to it. Instead, you need to create amazing web pages that get attention from search engines. While it can be expensive to do this, there are ways to save money.

If you’re comfortable online, you can make your own website. Look for the best free web design tools to help you. While some of them might be a bit basic, they’ll get the job done. If you’ve got a little money to spend, you can look into the best HTML software for website design. While this might take more time to set up, it will allow you to customize your website more.

The best information website design can be found by looking online. There are companies devoted to website design that can help. Even if you don’t want to hire them, many will provide information on their blogs about how to do it yourself. Take some time to find reputable sources, then study the resources that they provide for you.

Now more than ever, web design is crucial to the success of any business online. Consider, according to Internet Retailer, eCommerce in the United States is expected to grow by 16.4% by the end of 2013. With hundreds of billions of dollars being spent online every year by American consumers, are you doing everything you can to produce a well-designed webpage and earn consumer attention? Whether you’re a novice website designer or a professional web developer, here are six dos and don’ts of professional web development to improve your chances of marketing success.

1. 1. Don’t Go Overboard with Photos

As the best website designers in the world know, less is more in great web design. As About.com points out, a website that is overloaded with graphics is going to take a very long time to load. Consider, recent statistics from KissMetrics show that 44% of mobile users will permanently abandon your page if it takes too long to load. Keep it simple to avoid that problem.

1. 1. Adapt Your Design to the Season

Designer-Daily suggests all web designers take the time to update their webpages or those they service for clients to reflect the season. By following industry trends around Christmas, for example, you can take advantage of the cheer and consumer spirit that comes with the holidays.

1. 1. Make Scanning Your Page Easy

According to Slate, most web users will only read 50% of what’s on a webpage. Why? Web users have an increasingly short attention span. If you want any chance of your readers getting to your call of action, you need to make your page easy to scan. Using header tags and lists is a great way to make your content more readable.

1. 1. Don’t Ignore SEO Principles

Website designers around the world have had to learn the hard way that there is no real difference between SEO and web design. Using smart SEO principles, website designers can create a website that is easy to find in Google and other big search engines, while providing something aesthetically and functionally pleasing for consumers. With 93% of online experiences beginning with a search engine, according to Informza, this should be a no-brainer.

1. 1. Don’t Ignore Copy

No matter how good of a product a website designer offers you, the truth is that it won’t matter without great copy to go with it. As Marketing Sherpa writes, producing high quality content is the number one way to be found in search engines, ensuring you both make and retain loyal fans. Great copy can be so effective that it can improve your site’s traffic by as much as 1,200% in 12 months.

1. 1. Don’t Try to Target Everyone

Forbes suggests that there are few web design mistakes more damaging than not having a focus for your efforts. Trying to target everyone, the source writes, is the single best way to target no one. Find out who your target audience is before you design a page; from that point on, you can tailor design and copy to their preferences.

As we plunge deeper into the Internet Age, few things will be as important going forward as smart web marketing. With these six dos and don’ts for better web design, you can make sure your own website design is as smart as can be. Get more info here.