4 Essentials to Effective Website Design from HostGator - Jeff Barrett

As a leader in web hosting, HostGator knows how important websites are in the modern age. Today, the Internet has become the prime avenue for businesses to interact with their customers, and websites are often the first place consumers go to learn about a product or service. On the other hand, the Internet has also become a place for people to interact with friends, watch television, read the news, learn about new music, and partake in all other manner of activity.

What’s the key to all of this? A great website.

While websites can be extremely important and incredibly valuable for small businesses or entrepreneurs everywhere, building a good one can also be expensive, time consuming, and stressful; especially for those who aren’t tech savvy.

Here's a few tips and strategies first-time website creators can use to build a high-quality website while still saving money, and not losing themselves in stress and frustration.

1. Start at the beginning

It is important to deliver great and informative content in as few clicks as possible. This should follow through your entire site and not simply the homepage. Visitors are more likely to not return the site if the information can’t be found almost instantly. You need to make it easy for the visitor to find the information they need or want.

2. Build supporting pages

One important role of the landing page is to act as a switchboard of sorts that directs visitors to all other parts of the site. As such, a landing page cannot be completed until a web developer lays out the infrastructure and purpose of supporting pages. A well thought-out and helpful internal linking strategy—one that compels visitors to click from one page of your site to the next—is almost as important as a website’s actual copy, so make sure the infrastructure is in place.

3. Make a good impression

The landing page can make a good first impression on website visitors just by looking good, but looks will only get a developer so far in the web world. The site also needs to have content that builds a site’s credibility and respectability with regards to the subject matter being presented.

That leads to another necessity: an actual rhetorical goal. When visiting a new website, web surfers will immediately ask, “What’s the point?” in regards to your content, layout, images, and everything else on your website. Announcing the topic of the site—a business, an organization, or a cause—will only get you half way.

Design your website with a specific goal in mind: decide what you want from your visitors (purchases, shares, contact requests, etc.), and then design the site to drive that goal.

4. Take speed into account

Slow websites are a huge liability in the modern age. Readers, today, are more prone to distractions than ever before, and a site that takes ten seconds to load on every visit isn’t going to achieve its specified goal. Choosing a faster web-hosting company, expanding to new servers, or even limiting the number of embedded advertisements, pictures, and videos a site can all do a lot to boost its speed.

Think with Your Users in Mind When Designing a Website

Once the landing page is perfect, the infrastructure sleek, and the content professional, a website still isn’t complete. On the contrary, HostGator insists that designing for the best user experience has added a whole new dimension to the process of creating a website.

The first step is optimizing the site for use with mobile browsers. A large percentage of today’s web surfers only browse the web and read articles on their mobile device, whether it’s an iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy, a tablet, or any other tech object. Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly, therefore, can actually end up turning away more than half of their potential readership. Sites that use responsive design can be automatically fitted to a variety of different browsers and screen size making them much easier to navigate. It’s still important to keep your page file sizes as small as possible to ensure that your site loads quickly, though.

Finally, once the site is done and optimized for both desktop use and mobile access, it’s time to hit social media. The modern web manager no longer has to focus on overseeing a single website. Instead, they also often have to consider social networks like Twitter and Facebook and how they fit into the overall traffic generation plans for the site. If a business is selling something, most of those sales are going to come from its official website. However, many of the conversations and interactions that drive users to the site—and to that sale—are likely going to come from social media.

Your audience will be sure to visit and revisit your site if you follow these tips. You want to keep it simple and easy for your audience to find the information they need or want. Make sure the impression you make is a good one because they last. HostGator understands the necessity for websites in this day and age and will help you make your site the best it can be.

About this article

Article Author: Jeff Barrett

Business Insider's #1 Ad Exec on Twitter. Forbes Top 50 in Social Media. Once stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.

— Author's Blog

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