Website Design - The important things you need to do.

byEBeins

194 followers

5 years ago

Creating your website.

How many of you jumped straight in and started creating your website. Looking at the features of different plugins and implementing all the new gadgets.

Like a kid let loose in a candy shop, having a taste of all the different sweets. In the end you will have a tummy ache and a bad feeling that you shouldn't have done that.

Don't worry I am as guilty as all of you, I did that with my first website that I build many years ago. I have gathered a lot of knowledge since then what makes a solid website.

First of all just let me make one thing clear upfront.
Content is KING, if your website doesn't have good authentic content, It will not rank on page one. So your focus should be on creating authentic content.

Even if your content is good there are still things that make people leave your site!

Slow loading website.

Slow loading websites is the main reason people click away from your site.
There are several reasons that your site is loading slow and if you have got them all your site is crawling.

WA has got an excellent SITE Speed accelerator but preventing is better than relying on this. If you want to check how your site is preforming go to GTmetrx.com and enter your URL, then run it.

It will show you your speed and a lot of other things. If you haven't activated your SITE speed yet, click the website link on the left in your console screen, in the popup click the "view details" button.

Now set the SITE speed to on and the caching option to extreme.

Here are the main reasons for your site running slow.

1. You picked a theme that is bloating your site.
2. You use a page builder that is bloating your site.
3. Your images are not optimised for your site.
4. You run embedded videos on your site.

I must say the SITE speed works really well, but I myself try to prevent things rather than fixing them afterwards with SITE speed.

The problem with themes and page builders

Themes look great when you first start building your site but after a while you start seeing thru things. Themes at bloating to your website, this means that you increase the size of your site.

So people have been creating plugins to deal with these issues, to me as an engineer this is putting the horse behind the cart.

The page builders are great they give you more flexibility in creating your website but again they add a significant amount of bloating to your site.

Trying to fix this with plugins is again adding more size to your website. So what is the answer to this, you need to have theme and the trade of time to use a page builder is a valid one.

There is another option, take a deep breath you need some Oxygen. Oxygen Builder that is.
Oxygen Builder eliminates themes and is true website builder, not a page builder.

The down site is that it is not free but hey you get unlimited installs, lifetime updates and supports, you are allowed to use it on websites that you design for other.

Don't worry I am not an affiliate, they don't have an affiliate program. I have used it on my website and it works great. You can check my site out here and see for yourself. My site loads in just over 1 sec.

This is due to Oxygen Builder creating clean code for your site and only adding 20Kbytes for Oxygen Builder itself. Some other Page Builders add Mbytes.

Your images and videos on your site.

You should optimise your images to be as small as possible, without effecting how they display. I use a program called gimp, you can get it for free and it is like Photoshop.

If your videos are embedded on your site, they will load during startup. This makes your site really slow.

To avoid this you can get a plugin WP Video Popup, they have got a free version, but the paid one is worth it only $19 for the year. It allows you to display multiple videos on the same page.

Videos only load when they are clicked, not at the start while loading your website.

Now having said all this it is time to look at the web design.

Guides for a good web design.

I will list the things that matter to creating a good customer experience.

Before I do that, I would like to say one important thing. You need to realise that the website that you are designing is not for you! What do I mean by that!

Yes you are creating the site but it is your customer that will decide if he likes your site or not! This means what you like personally is not always what the customer likes.

The things that I will list below are things that have been tested and proven to work.

So here we go.

1. Paragraph length, keep them sort.
2. Sentence width 2.5 to 3 alphabets wide (max 78 characters)
   
3. Font size, bigger font reads easier (18 to 20)
4. Headings, Title should be the biggest Heading and step down after that.
5. Spaces around different parts of your website should be equal.
6. Break up different sections on your page with slide tone difference in the background.
   
7. Images, make sure you size your images consistently.
8. Keep the feel and look of your website consistent.
9. Colours have got a meaning, use the right colours with the content that you are conveying. Else people get confused.
10. Don't go overboard on gimmicks, they just distract the customer from reading the content.
11. Give your website a clean fresh look, that is easy on the eyes.
12. Content, check the quality, readability, spelling and grammar.

If anyone else likes to add other things, that he knows work well please put them in the comments below. So we can build a record here for people to use.

Cheers

Eric.