Digital best practices that can set your website up for success

Article by Jill Collins, PhD
This article originally appeared on Forbes

Digital best practices that can set your website up for success

Establishing or refreshing a digital presence can be intimidating for everyone from a struggling startup to an established brand. A custom website tends to be an expensive, high priority asset that provides critical information and builds brand equity for a number of stakeholders. It’s important to consider that half of consumers say their impression of a brand comes from that brand’s company website, and almost everyone values a website that is easy to navigate and intuitive to use. These best practices can help you build a solid foundation for a website that engages your audience, feels easy to navigate, and successfully directs people where you want them to go.

Set yourself up for success with research

Knowing your audience is the first step toward giving them what they want. Something that years of operating an advertising agency has taught me is that it doesn’t pay to assume you already know your audience’s mindset. It is possible — even likely — that they have needs and motivations that you haven’t considered. Before you embark on a web project, consider interviewing your desired users to ensure you better understand their goals. That gives you the insight you need to design a website that can best fulfill their needs

One of the nice things about designing a website (as opposed to designing something static like a billboard or flier) is that you can validate and iterate as you go. Track users journeys, use heat maps to see what is drawing your user’s attention, and make improvements as needed. Once your website is live, you can continue to use analytics to gather audience insights. That will help you stay on track to meet their needs (as well as the needs of your brand).

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize

After you’ve done some research, the next step is to decide what information is the most important and should be the focus of your website (or individual pages on your website). Knowing what content your audience is seeking on your website can help a great deal, but it’s likely you’ll still have to make some tough choices, especially determining how you can present the desired content in a flow that helps navigate them towards your business goals for the site.

Before you develop the content for your website, it is helpful to start with a sitemap and wireframe, essentially establishing a list of what kind of content goes where. We have lots of cues at our disposal for communicating to our audience which information is most important. Putting our most compelling messages in headlines, then supporting them with subheadings and body copy, establishes a fast, visual information hierarchy that motivates your audience to consume more. Putting your most important messages higher up on the page is another fast visual cue. You’ll know you’ve succeeded when a new user can skim your website to quickly find what they are looking for.

Accessibility IS usability

No matter who your audience is, designing with accessibility in mind will ensure that you can accommodate any user who visits your website. Accessible design is good design, because all users benefit, and fewer are excluded, regardless of their specific needs.

There are some rules of thumb you can follow, like choosing high contrast colors to help with legibility, and avoiding noisy or cluttered backgrounds. Once you’ve got initial designs, you can use resources such as webaim​.org to help check whether you are hitting your accessibility targets. Another accessibility consideration is having a website that works well on a variety of device sizes. When you design in one format (like your desktop) it can be easy to miss problems in other formats. Your users may rely on desktop computers, but they may also use tablets or their phones — users are 67% more likely to make a purchase on a mobile-friendly site. Having a site that performs on more devices can help ensure you’re meeting more of your audience where they’re at.

Consistency is king

Using a consistent style and layout can help users familiarize themselves with your content faster. This is true both within your website, and within the context of the wider web. While you want to design something that stands out from your competitors, that doesn’t usually extend to ignoring best practices. Navigation items and buttons, for example, should almost always be located where your users expect them to be. It’s worth noting that you may find in your research that the place your audience expects these items to live may not be the same place you are envisioning them.

Along these lines, I recommend using simple, straightforward language for your website’s navigation. As an example, if you’ve got a newsfeed, labeling it ​“newsfeed” is likely to be clear to your user, but labeling it ​“exciting thoughts” may confuse them, even if it seems more appealing at first glance.

While building your website can feel intimidating, following best practices can help the project feel manageable, and greatly improve your end result. Reaching out and finding an expert partner can help, either to audit your existing work, or to create something new, but whether you’re hiring an expert or crafting something on your own, these tips will give you a good basis for what to strive for.