Web Design in 2023

Key elements of effective web design

Effective web design encompasses various elements that contribute to the overall success of a website. These include a user-friendly navigation menu, responsive design, visually appealing graphics, optimized loading times, and easy-to-find contact information. Incorporating these elements into your website design ensures that users have a positive experience and are more likely to convert into customers.

Should you use an online website builder to design a website?

Designing a website in 2023 involves a step-by-step process that begins with understanding the business goals and target audience. Let's explore the key steps involved in designing a website:

The website design process explained

My starting point for a website project involves talking to the website client about the business that they are promoting and then analysing what their prospective customers are actually searching for online. The potential customer may be looking online to try and get help with a problem, or to satisfy a need that they feel they have. They may very well be looking for more information before they make a decision and a website is an excellent opportunity to provide that information. 

The website design process typically involves several stages, starting with planning and research, followed by designing mockups, and finally, coding and development. Each stage requires careful consideration and collaboration between the design team and the client to ensure a successful outcome.

Personally, I like to build a test site where I can experiment with different layouts, different colours and fonts and get a full understanding of how the site will work when it is put live on the client's live domain. The huge advantage of this strategy is that my client can also be involved at this stage because they can also view the test site on their devices whether they live in York, New York, or wherever they happen to be in the world.
The client can then decide at an early stage what design changes they would like to see. They can also see how their text content will look on a real site. They can also get used to the on-board admin pages to maintain the text and even build out some initial blog posts. All this content can be secured and copied to the live website, ready for the live website launch so it is a win-win scenario.

Choosing whether to use a website builder and an existing template for your website

There are many online companies offering website builders that allow you to do your own development and these generally use the concept of a template.

Website templates provide a pre-designed framework that can be customised to suit your own personal needs and aesthetics. The disadvantage of using a template is that your website starts to look and feel like multiple other websites on the internet. Also, the customisation of the template only goes so far, so you may find that you come up against a brick wall further down the road when you want to change something.

You are also committing yourself to spending a lot of your time, understanding how the website builder works, what its limitations are and what you need to know to get the best out of it. There are many pitfalls you may inadvertently fall into along the way without professional advice and you may not have the personal time to devote to your project to become sufficiently experienced in the technical side of website design, over which, with website builders you have very limited control.

A better option would be to take the best design elements from several different websites that you like and ask a web developer if they can be incorporated into your own personal bespoke design.

Have a discussion with your web developer about what features you would like to see on the website. That way you can get a feel about how these features may be integrated into your site and what other services may be involved to provide the required features. For example, do you need a way for viewers to sign up for a newsletter or do you need to have a method for viewers to book appointments? 

Incorporating SEO into your website design

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential aspect of website design. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can improve its visibility and attract visitors. The most important consideration is knowing what customers are actually searching for which is where keyword research comes in. Understanding that is the starting point as it may have a bearing on what pages you will have built into your website. Each page has its own metadata i.e. meta tags that help search engines understand what your page is about. Each page may be optimised for a different set of keywords.

The keyword analysis can be done using Google’s free Keyword Analysis Tool which is part of Google Ads but you don’t need to sign up for ads in order to use it. The key metrics it will show are the average monthly searches for a particular keyword and an indicator of the level of competition. That is, how difficult is it going to be to get a site onto page one of Google for a particular keyword? The beauty of doing this exercise is that it may highlight some keywords that you’ve never even thought of. Or on the other hand, it may show that the keyword that you thought you wanted your site to rank for is in fact going to be a tough ask because of the level of competition. 

Even a basic understanding of how search engine optimisation will help before starting a website project. Even the URL that you choose to buy is relevant because having keywords in the URL is useful for SEO purposes.

In summary, using a website builder may initially appear to be an easy option but there are a lot of stages and complexities to navigate through. You may spend a lot of time on building a site that doesn't perform well so if you don't have the time or technical knowhow to do this I would recommend hiring a website developer who will guide you through what you need to provide and present you with various design options to consider.