Tag Archives: web hosting tips

10 Ways to Get Your Website in Shape for the New Year in 2019

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Hosting

The post 10 Ways to Get Your Website in Shape for the New Year in 2019 appeared first on HostGator Blog . A New Year should come with new goals for your business . As you work through your end-of-year to do list – reevaluating your finances, hiring new employees, and deciding which tactics to embrace or toss aside in the year to come – it’s important that you make plans to maintain your website along with your larger business. Your website is the main way a lot of people interact with your brand, after all. “One of the most often overlooked components—yet one of the most critical—to any successful website strategy is ongoing maintenance. While the initial website project is critical to creating the right foundation, the ongoing maintenance and upkeep is where you’ll really see your website shine,” writes Don Cranford , principal and director of technology at Katalyst Solutions. If you’ve tended to let general maintenance of your website slide over the years, make it one of your goals moving into the New Year to correct that. Here are a few action items to add to your to-do list now to get your website in shape for 2019. 1. Evaluate your analytics. Analytics are the ultimate tool for examining the health of your website traffic . It’s vital for your team to understand how your visitors and qualified leads find your business. Knowing whether people come to your website from organic search, paid search, or Facebook tells you a lot about how your online marketing efforts are working. And keeping an eye on your analytics as part of regular website maintenance can save you trouble down the line. Kim Garst , founder and CEO of Boom! Social, offers the following suggestion, “Compile a bunch of blog posts on a particular topic, and promote them as a multi-day e-course. Each day, send one email (blog post) to your new subscribers to help them accomplish whatever goal you have promised to help them achieve.” Don’t be afraid to revisit your content archives and promote your old content anew. Your audience that’s been with you for a while may appreciate the refresher, and your new audience will get to see some of your old hits for the first time.   5. Revamp your homepage. Your website’s homepage will be the first impression you make on many visitors – you’d better make it a good one. Your homepage should accomplish a few main goals:   Clearly communicate your brand’s positioning (why should a customer choose you?)   Look professional (you don’t want to scare new visitors off by looking like you’re still in the 90s )   Answer the main questions people may have (where you’re located, contact information, etc.)   Make it easy for people to know where to go next Update your design by tweaking the navigation of your site. Anticipate where consumers will click and provide clear calls-to-action to help them locate what they need. Eliminate any wording that doesn’t benefit the visitor. Too many words can distract customers from their intended reason for checking out your site. In the example below, HostGator customer  Hiatus Spa + Retreat  uses their site to say more with less. The website looks clean and professional, has a clear CTA, and provides an intuitive menu for those who want to find more information. A few words and vivid imagery can go a long way. Make the best first impression by showcasing a modern, uncluttered homepage. It’ll give clarity and accessibility to your visitors.   6. Review and improve your calls-to-action (CTAs). Every page on your website should be designed with a clear goal in mind. You should always know what you want your visitor to do next, and it should be obvious to them how to do it. The CTAs you include on each page have an important job to do , but you shouldn’t just assume they’re all doing that job. Check your analytics to see how often the people who visit your pages are taking the action you most want them to. Then do some experimenting. Work up different variations on your CTAs – try different visual designs, different wording, and different locations on the page. Try out different CTAs on different pages to see if some work better when paired with specific content. Do A/B testing to confirm which of the CTAs you try work best. The more data you have, the more you can refine your website so that people are more likely to take the steps you want them to.   7. Fix any checkout process issues. Everything else you design your website to accomplish leads back to the main end goal of sales. If you’re not driving revenue, you won’t last. To meet your sales goals, your checkout process must be frictionless. Jeremy Said . If you discover that customers hate creating member registrations, one solution is to try a social login. This one-click alternative will help consumers move through the checkout process faster. If you’ve noticed the checkout seems to stop at the moment the customer sees the cost of shipping , think about offering flat-rate shipping or free shipping for qualifying orders. Anything that stops the sale from happening is bad for business. Figure out what roadblocks are in your customer’s pathway and remove them.   8. Make sure your security’s up-to-date. Every time a story about a data breach makes waves, people get a little more nervous about handing their credit card information over to businesses. You can’t help what happens in the news, but you can take steps to keep your own website secure and ensure all the private information your customers give you is protected. Go through our web security checklist and make sure your security measures are up to date. There are some easy ways to reduce vulnerabilities in your website to make your customer data safer. You owe it to your customers to do your part in protecting them.   9. Check your domain registration. This is a simple step to take, but one you have to remember to do every year. Contact your hosting provider to learn when your registration will expire. If it’s due soon, go ahead and pay for the renewal, and consider signing up for auto-renewals for future registrations. And remember to update any contact information—business name, address, and phone number. It also may be time to purchase a new domain for upcoming brand changes . So, ask your provider for details about availability and prices. Sometimes the smallest things in your business are overlooked. Make sure your domain registration continues so you can offer uninterrupted service to your customers 10. Reinvest in your brand community. This is less something that you do to your website, and more something that you do for it. As your business grows, it’s essential to keep your brand community engaged. Make a plan this year to give your consumers the engagement they deserve. Respond promptly to comments left on your blog posts. Take time to say thanks in response to positive reviews and ensure that no complaint goes unanswered. Interact with users on social media – plan to be quick and polite at least, but if your social media manager is up to it, try to be clever or entertaining as well. Experiment with starting a new loyalty program or making improvements to the one you have. Brand ambassadors serve as an extension of your company. If they’re not satisfied, you may expose your business to unwanted negative publicity. Get reacquainted with your target audience. A dedicated community opens the door to business opportunities.   A New Year, A Better Website It’s time to roll up your sleeves. The New Year is a time to reflect and reassess your business’s needs, and that includes your website. A better website is part of running a better business. A few tweaks now could garner you better results in the year to come and ensure your website can continue to do the important job it does for your business. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Design an eCommerce Website

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Design an eCommerce Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . When building an eCommerce website , you know that the ultimate goal of the site is to get people to make purchases. You can’t just focus on building an e-commerce site that looks great (although that’s worth doing too) – you have to make sure every element of the web design guides people toward the point of buying something from you. Fortunately, building an eC ommerce website is easier than it’s ever been. You don’t have to hire an expensive designer or learn coding from scratch. If you don’t have much money to spend or time to work with, you can use a eCommerce website builder to create an eCommerce site that’s professional and geared toward achieving your goals. Whether you build the website yourself or hire someone to do the legwork, there are a few important steps you should take to make sure your eCommerce website will do its job. 1. Organize Your eCommerce Website Based On How People Shop. One of the first steps to building an eCommerce website is figuring out what pages and categories to include. You’ll obviously want a home page and pages for each of your different products. But how will you organize all those product pages so that people can find what they’re looking for? Think about how your potential customers are likely to shop and browse and build out the site architecture that makes the most sense based on that. For example, if you sell pet food and supplies, you might organize your website based on the type of pet your visitors have (dog, cat, fish, mouse, etc.) with subcategories under each for product types (toys, treats, food, etc.). Anyone visiting the site can pretty quickly figure out how to narrow down their search based on their particular needs.  And by visiting a page that groups a lot of similar products together, they can browse all the dog treats or cat toys available and pick the one they most want.   2. Make Your eCommerce Site Responsive. According to mobile shopping trends , almost a third of all shopping online now happens on mobile devices. If your eCommerce website doesn’t work well on mobile, you’ll be missing out on a lot of potential sales (and it will hurt your SEO to boot). For most eCommerce websites , the best way to make your website mobile friendly is to make it responsive. Responsive websites provide the same information and images on each page no matter what device they’re on, but they position them differently in order to make the page fit the screen. An image that shows up next to text on the desktop will show up below it, for instance. Luckily, responsive websites have become enough of a norm that a good website builder or designer will offer a responsive option as a matter of course.   3. Include a Search Bar. Many of your visitors will be content to browse the site to find items they like, but some will know exactly what they’re looking for. A search bar gives them a way to get directly to the page they need and is, therefore, one of those features that every eCommerce site should have .   4. Have a Shopping Cart. Your ideal customer isn’t going to see one item they like and go straight to the purchase process. They’ll spend some time browsing and choosing several items they want. A shopping cart is another standard feature of eCommerce stores because it allows visitors to save the items they want to purchase while they continue browsing, and then go through the purchasing process once for all of them. And for visitors that add items to a shopping cart but don’t buy right away, you can follow up with a reminder email to your customers to help nudge them back to the site toward a purchase.   5. Include Wish List Functionality. Including wish list functionality accomplishes a few different things: It gives people an easy place to point friends and family in the lead up to a gift-giving event – a situation people regularly make purchases for. For people who prefer to do research before they buy a product, it gives them a chance to save the items they like for possible future purchase. For anyone avoiding impulse buys for budgetary reasons, they can mark now the things they want to come back for later. Giving people a way to use your website to create a list of items they want creates a few opportunities where those items are more likely to become future sales.   6. Include Reviews. Over half of regular online shoppers  say they read reviews almost every time they shop online. Looking at customer reviews has become a regular part of the purchasing process.By including a review feature on your website, you give your customers a way to hear directly from each other – which is more powerful than what you can tell them. Enabling reviews from third parties shows your customers you’re confident that your products can stand up to customers’ honest feedback. And if the reviews are positive (which they should be if your products are solid), they’ll increase your sales. As an added benefit, reviews can help you gain valuable feedback about the products you offer and the service experience your customers have. You may be able to pick up some tips that help you improve your eCommerce business results over time. For example, at HostGator, we feature reviews on a dedicated page on our site: 7. Offer a Guest Checkout Option. When someone takes the step of creating an account on your website, it provides you with awesome long-term opportunities. It means they can use some of the features we’ve talked about here – like creating wish lists and adding reviews –  and that you can provide them with relevant promotional emails and reminder emails after cart abandonment. But creating an account takes time and for some visitors who aren’t sure they’ll come back, it can feel like an inconvenience to have to take the steps of creating an account. They just want to make their purchase already. Including an easier guest checkout option removes friction from the checkout process so more people are willing to go through the whole process, rather than changing their mind when it looks too time-consuming. 8. Invest in High-Quality Product Photography. For physical products, a photograph can often tell your visitors valuable information about the product that your words can’t communicate as well. 78% of online shoppers say they want to see images that bring products to life. You not only need to provide photographs for all of the products you sell, but you should also invest in making sure the images are high quality. Whether you take the photos yourself or invest in a professional product photographer, make sure the images you use look great and show your products in the best light.   9. Make Your Contact Info Easy to Find. You should do your best to answer all the common questions your customers may have on your website, but even so, you’ll have customers that need to get in touch at some point. When that happens, make it as easy as possible for them to find a way to get in touch about whatever issue they’re having. Don’t make them dig through the website for a simple email address or phone number. You can’t provide good customer service until your customer has successfully managed to get in touch. And customer service is the best tool you have for repeat business.   10. Perform User Testing. Building an eCommerce website requires doing a lot of guessing about what people will respond to. Even if you work really hard to put your potential visitors first and try to design the site based on how you think they’ll behave, you won’t get it all right on your own. Before you launch, do some  website usability testing . Bring in some other people who can look at your website with fresh eyes. Have them take the steps on the site you most want your visitors to take – like creating an account, making a purchase, and signing up for the email list. They can provide honest feedback about any difficulties or inconvenience they experienced. Their feedback will enable you to make any last minute tweaks needed to correct problems you didn’t know how to see yourself.   Design Your eCommerce Website with Quality in Mind eCommerce businesses live and die on the quality of their websites. Make sure you do your due diligence to build a successful eCommerce site that can do the main job you need it to. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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What to Look for in a Website Builder

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Hosting

The post What to Look for in a Website Builder appeared first on HostGator Blog . You know you need a website, but you don’t know the first thing about how to build one. Without any coding or design skills, you’re not really sure where to start. But these days, you don’t need a complex set of skills to design a website, you just need a good website builder. Website builders make creating and customizing a website easy enough for anybody to do it—no coding required. When you start looking into which website builder to use for your new website, you’ll notice that there are a lot of options to choose from. Trying to figure out which one to go with can be intimidating, especially if you don’t know enough to even know what to look for. Top 10 Features to Look for in a Website Builder When choosing the right website builder for you, there are ten main factors you should consider.   1. Ease of use A website builder is supposed to make the process of building a website easy (that’s kind of the whole point). When you’re considering what website builder to go with, make sure you find one that has an intuitive editing tool so you can easily shape your website to look and feel how you want it to. Drag-and-drop functionality is a good feature to look for, since it means you can move components of the page around with your mouse—something anyone can do, regardless of their level of web design experience. And the editing tool should have features that enable you to change out colors, add new elements to the page, and upload any media you want to add without having to learn any new skills.   2. Lots of templates The first step to creating a website with a website builder is choosing your template . The template provides a design and structure for you to start with, so you’re not having to build your site from scratch. From there, it’s easy to make changes to the template to make your website better represent your unique brand. Building your website will be easier if you’re able to select a template that comes close to what you have in mind for your site. So make sure the website builder you go with supplies a good number of templates for you to choose from.   3. Responsive options People now browse the web on their mobile devices more than their computers. For your website to work well for the majority of visitors, it needs to be mobile friendly. The best way to do that is to build a website that’s responsive. Responsive websites have all the same elements and content no matter what device you visit them on, but they’re automatically arranged in the way that makes them look good on whatever screen size a visitor views them on. The website builder you go with should offer an easy way for you to make your website responsive. Offering responsive templates is a good option, since you won’t have to do anything extra to make your website mobile friendly—you’ll start out with it that way.   4. Customization options Templates are great for making the website creation process easier, but you want to be sure you can turn that template into something unique. A good website builder should provide plenty of options for customizing your website. You should be able to change out colors, add new pages, load your own images, and add icons and buttons in the shapes and sizes you desire. You don’t want a website that looks just like everybody else’s, the whole point is to create something that represents your specific brand. Go with a website builder that gives you plenty of room to customize the template you choose to turn it into something wholly yours.   5. SEO features With so many websites already out there, getting people to find yours will be a challenge. A website builder that has SEO features can give you a little head start by helping you optimize your website’s pages for visibility in the search engines. Adding relevant keywords to each web page’s URL, meta description , and image tags communicates to Google what your website is about so they’re more likely to include you in searches for that term. A good website builder will make that easy to do.   6. Social share features Once your website’s up, you want to promote it! And ideally, you want visitors that like your site to promote it too. Social share features can help on both fronts. You can easily push out new content to your social networks to let your followers know about it, and you can make it easy for visitors to share your web pages with their followers with one click as well.   7. Affordability You probably don’t have a ton of money to spend on your website. And website builders generally bill on a subscription model, so you have to consider the long-term costs as well as what you can afford at this moment. Choose a website builder that falls within your ongoing budget for your website. Most website builders cost somewhere in the range of $4-$40 a month. In some cases, the cost includes features or services you would otherwise have to spend more for, so make sure you consider everything that’s included in the price instead of just going with the cheapest option.   8. Image library All websites need images, they’re a key part of how people will experience the site. Unless you’re a photographer or illustrator, finding good images to populate your site with can be difficult and time consuming. A website builder that includes an image library can save you a lot of trouble, make your website look great, and help you get your website up and running faster,   9. Educational resources While ideally, the website builder you use will be easy to figure out, you still want access to helpful resources that lay out what all the features are and how to use them. Check if the website builder you consider offers tutorials on how to use it. You’ll get more out of your website builder if you’re able to get a full understanding of everything it can do for you and how to make use of it all.   10. Good customer support If you face any issues while creating your website, or worse, once it’s up, you want to trust you can get ahold of someone to help fast. Look for a website builder that offers 24/7 support and has a reputation for being helpful when customers need it. Hopefully you won’t ever need customer support, but it’s important to know it’s there and reliable if you ever do. A website builder should make your life easier and enable you to put together a website that does everything you want it to. But it’s important to find one that offers everything you need.   Meet the HostGator Website Builder HostGator offers a website builder that does everything on the list and comes with web hosting included. You can save a little money by investing in both things at once, and get started creating the website you’ve been wanting. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Create a Forum for Your Website

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Create a Forum for Your Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . Whether you run a business website or a personal blog, one of the main reasons to build a website is to reach other people. If you want your website to become a place people regularly want to visit, then your goal should be to build a community around it. That’s a big goal, and you can help achieve it and even go a step further by creating a forum for your website. By enabling communication that goes more than two ways, a forum can create an active online community that not only engages with your content – but also allows users to interact with each other. In essence, a forum can become a valuable part of achieving your website goals. 5 Benefits of Creating a Forum For Your Website A forum does require extra work, so you want to be confident it’s a good choice for your particular type of website before diving in. If done well, creating a forum for your website can yield some significant benefits.   1. It provides a place for a community to grow. Having a website that gets visitors is nice, but if most of what you learn about your visitors is what you see in Google Analytics , then there’s a lot you still don’t know. Getting visitors isn’t the same thing as having a community. A community is active and engages with your website on a regular basis. The members of a community feel like they’re a part of something when they come to your website. They have a higher level of investment than someone just passing through. That makes them valuable partners in the overall success of your site.   2. It gives readers a reason to keep coming back. Many websites struggle with turning one-time visitors into regular traffic . Anyone who participates in your website’s forum cares about what others in the community have to say. They’ll want to see responses to the posts they make and follow conversations on topics they’re interested in. To stay a part of the conversation, they’ll keep coming back.   3. Your readers can learn from each other, as well as from you. You work hard to provide valuable content to your visitors. As your community grows, you’ll have a difficult time answering every single question they have. And sometimes, other people in the community will have better answers anyway. Giving community members direct access to each other can be especially useful for any business that sells complicated products. Your customers can help each other do general troubleshooting, offloading some of your customer service burden while still resulting in satisfied customers. We see this at work in the HostGator forums . When one web hosting customer asks a question, another often chimes in with the answer. Newer members get the help of more experienced members, and long-term participants are able to distinguish themselves as helpful and knowledgeable in the community.   4. You can see what your followers are talking about. If you do content marketing , then you know that coming up with relevant topics your audience cares about is an ongoing challenge. But even if you don’t, any glimpse into the questions and issues your audience has can translate into useful feedback on your website and products. Businesses frequently spend money and time on market research to try and figure out what their audience is thinking. When you have an active forum, all you have to do is follow the conversations your members have there to gain the same information. The forum in Carol Tice’s subscription community for professional writers helps fuel her blog posts. She can reference forum conversations and answer common questions she sees members ask. Because of the discussions in the forum, she knows the topics her audience cares about and can make sure her website provides the answers they’re looking for.   5. An open forum can improve SEO. Private forums can make sense for businesses that want to create a subscription community or membership website, but if you go that route you do lose out on this benefit. If you create a forum for your website that’s accessible on the open web, then every new conversation your community members have creates a new page to be indexed by search engines. Not only is regular fresh content good for SEO, but as your forum begins to cover more and more topics (using the language of your audience, no less), those forum pages and user-generated content could begin to show up for search terms you haven’t covered yet on your main website.   How to Create a Forum on Your Website Ready to set up your website forum? Here are three steps to get started.   1. Choose the right web hosting plan. If you’re ready to get started and create a forum on your website, then one of your first steps is to evaluate if your web hosting provider is up for the job. If your forum accomplishes the goal of bringing a community of regular visitors to your website, then you can expect an uptick in traffic. Make sure the web hosting plan you have now can support the forum software you choose to use and the increase in traffic likely to occur. If your current plan isn’t going to cut it, take time to figure out a better option before you start building your forum.   2. Choose the right web forum software. Next, you’ll need software to create your forum with. Many of the most popular options are free and offer open-source software. A few of the top solutions to look into are:      phpBB      MyBB      Flarum      Simple Machines      bbPress Spend some time researching the different software options to get a feel for which will work best for you.   3. Create your forum. The right forum software should make this part relatively easy. The software you choose should offer resources to help you get started. Use them to get up to speed and start getting the basic structure of your forum in place.   How to Make Your Forum Successful For your forum to achieve your goals, you need to approach it with a strategy. These seven steps can help your forum go from a promising idea to a successful community-building tool.   1. Clarify your forum’s themes. What is your forum going to be about? People need to know what they’ll be joining before they can decide if it’s right for them or not. Before you launch your forum, clarify the primary themes and topics that people will be discussing there. When you launched your website, you (hopefully) took some time to figure out your unique positioning statement – what makes your website different from similar ones and why your visitors should care. Now you’ll need to do the same thing for your forum. Think about why it’s valuable from your audience’s point of view. What topics and issues will they want to discuss? Why should they do it on your website’s forum? Obviously, your forum’s themes should relate to what you cover on your website. Beyond that, get more specific in working out what the forum’s purpose and focus will be.   2. Create a structure. Now turn the themes you settled on into a clear structure. Decide on the main categories and subcategories to divide your forum into. Your URL structure should be intuitive. Organizing discussions into a few main topics will make it easier for your members to find the information they need. So again here, have your target audience top of mind. What categories will make the most sense to them in helping them find what they’re looking for? The structure you create in the beginning doesn’t have to be set in stone. As you see how people interact in the forum over time, you may find that adding new categories or re-arranging how they’re organized works better. Know that your forum structure can evolve as needed, but do your best to make it intuitive and clear to begin with.   3. Develop clear rules. You may hope your target audience consists of nothing but the most pleasant and respectful people on the internet – but it is still the internet we’re talking about. When people can interact with others anonymously behind their screens, some inevitably show their worst sides. You can’t just launch your forum and hope for the best. You need to start out planning for the worst. Think about what you want your forum conversations to look like, and explicitly what you don’t want them to include. For that latter question, a look at active comment sections around the web will show examples of what you want your members to avoid. Spend some time reviewing the rules of other forums around the web as well. Their rules can serve as a jumping off point for you to develop yours. As an example, some rules you may want to include could be:     Be respectful to other community members, even when there’s a disagreement     No slurs or other discriminatory behavior     No name calling     No links to or recommendations of illegal items or activities in the forum     No NSFW (not safe for work) material     No spamming Make sure you post the rules at the top of the forum where everyone will see them. Add a note that everyone who participates in the forum is agreeing to abide by the rules. And develop a process for what you’ll do when someone breaks the rules. How many warnings will you provide before banning a user? Are there steps a banned user can take to be reinstated? Your rules won’t be worth much if you don’t have a system in place to enact consequences when people break them. Write out what that system will be and make it accessible to your users in advance to avoid issues later.   4. Promote your forum . For discussions to happen, people have to show up. Create a strategy for letting people in your audience know about your forum. Many of the same online marketing tactics you use for your website will be valuable for promoting your forum as well. Announce the new forum to your email list. Create content promoting it on your website and other sites around the web. Promote it on your social media accounts. Consider investing in PPC or social media advertising to get the word out. Once you have a decent number of members, this step will become less important. But it should make up the brunt of your efforts in the first days and weeks your forum is available.     5. Create some good discussion topics to get the conversation started. You know when you’re at a party and everyone’s hesitant to get out on the dance floor until the first brave few souls start dancing? New members of your forum who are still getting a feel for the place are unlikely to jump right into starting discussions. It will be your job to get the ball rolling on the first few conversations while people get comfortable. Have a few discussion topics in mind and start posting them with encouragement for others to chime in. Some forums also have consistent weekly discussion threads that can bring people together at an expected time to get talking. Consider basing a weekly thread around industry news, new member introductions, or other topics you know your audience cares about.   6. Moderate the discussions. Moderation is a big part of the job of running a forum. Without moderation, your forum can fall prey to spammers and trolls. If the forum messages are dominated by people trying to promote scams or a toxic culture of insults – no one’s going to stick around. In the early days of your forum, you may be able to do all the moderating yourself. Keep an eye on all the active threads and react quickly to any that break the rules. Don’t be afraid to delete inappropriate comments and issue warnings and bans to users when needed. Over time, if the job becomes too big, you may need to hire someone or recruit active members of the forum to help with moderation. Be warned that moderation can be tricky. If people feel like they’re being deleted or banned unfairly, you may face dissension within the community. That’s what makes having clear rules so important. As needed, you can point back to the guidelines everyone in the community agreed to by choosing to participate.   7. Solicit feedback and improve as you go. Running a forum can get complicated and you’re not going to be able to plan for everything in advance. You can’t predict what your members will do or want, or what issues will arise as the community grows. So be willing to actively ask your community for their input and listen when they give it. Conduct surveys or start threads in the forum soliciting people’s suggestions and complaints. Even if your forum starts off strong, there will always be ways to improve it. Do your best to find out how you can make it better and improve the forum experience over time. Ready to start building your forum? Choose your forum hosting plan today and start creating a forum for your website . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Web Design Best Practices: A Helpful Guide

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Hosting

The post Web Design Best Practices: A Helpful Guide appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your website is the main face of your brand online. And building your website with best practices in mind will ensure your brand is putting its best foot forward. What people see when they visit it influences how they see your brand – online and off. And your web design largely defines how people experience your website. In short, web design is important. A bad web design can make your website layout look unprofessional, lose visitors’ trust, or make it difficult for them to find what they’re looking for (and therefore increasing instead of reducing your bounce rates ). A good website design shows your visitors you know what you’re doing and that it’s worth sticking around and interacting with your brand. Whether you’re working on a building new website or launching a re-design for the one you already have, there are a few important web design best practices you should honor. 1. Make Your Site Navigation Intuitive. Part of the design process is figuring out how to organize all the pages and what to include in your website menus . Getting your site organization right is both important for your website architecture and because it determines how easy navigating your website is for visitors. When deciding what pages, categories, and subcategories to include in your website’s menus, think first about your visitors. What will make it easier for the average visitor to find what they’re looking for? But also decide what the most important pages you want them to find are. Strive to organize your website in a way that will make it just as intuitive to a first-time visitor as it is to someone who knows it well.   2. Maintain a Consistent Style. If you visited a website that had a specific style on the home page but changed to something completely different on the next page you linked on, you’d find the change confusing. You might wonder if you were in the right place at all or had somehow navigated away from the site you thought you were on. You don’t want your site visitors to deal with that kind of confusion. Early on in the design process, sit down to develop a web design style guide . A style guide is a useful web design tool that will help you make sure all the pages on your website visually match well enough to let visitors know they’re all related to each other as well as to your brand. Make sure it includes: The website’s color scheme The logo design to use (and any variations on it in terms of size and shape you’ll use throughout the site) The font(s) The visual style (for example, do you want a minimalist feel? A playful one?) As you move into the particulars of designing the site, your style guide will be a helpful resource to keep you on track.   3. Design Each Page With a Goal in Mind. You’re not just designing a website for fun, you want it to accomplish something. And even if you have one overarching goal for the whole website, different web pages will need to have more specific goals. For example, an eCommerce website will primarily be designed to get people to make purchases. But in order to do that, some pages will be focused on getting people to visit the website to begin with, so they’ll have the primary goal of improving search engine optimization  or encouraging social shares. Other pages will more directly try to get people to click that “Buy” button. Clearly define the specific goal you want and  to accomplish this and make sure your design for it centers the goal.   4. Keep Each Page Focused. Another good web design tip that goes hand in hand with having a specific goal for each web page is to make sure your pages have a clear focus. Don’t try to do too much on any one webpage. You don’t want your web pages to look cluttered – that not only makes it look bad (which makes visitors more likely to click away), but it also presents too many distractions. How will people know the next best step to take, if your page is filled with so many links and images and text that they can’t figure out what to focus on? If you realize a particular web page has too much going on, split it up into multiple pages. Having separate pages that each has a more clear focus will be good for user experience and improve your opportunities to optimize for SEO.   5. Make Your Website Responsive. Mobile use now surpasses computer use ,  and every year the amount of time people spend on the web on mobile devices only grows. For website owners, that means your web design has to prioritize the mobile friendly experience . In most cases, the best option for creating a website that works well both on desktop and mobile devices is to build a responsive website. Responsive web design involves identifying breakpoints on the page where the page can be cut off and everything to the side moved below the breakpoint without the experience losing anything. That’s why mobile devices often display the same images and text, but with all elements of the page that appear alongside each other on the desktop showing up as stacked above and below each other. When designing each page on your website, you need to define at least three breakpoints to ensure your pages work well on each of the three main device sizes (although many designers prefer to use more). To a large degree, responsive websites have become common enough that most web design tools or designers you turn to will automatically employ best practices for responsive web design. As just one example, all of the templates offered with HostGator’s website builder are responsive, so even newbie website owners that don’t know anything about HTML or other coding languages can easily create a website that’s responsive. No matter what web design tools you use though, make sure you design your website with mobile in mind and use responsive design best practices.   6. Use Fluid Images. Fluid images  can aid in responsive web design and improve user experience on your website. You can make any of the images you use fluid with the right HTML code. If you add “max-width: 100%” to the source code for the image, you’re letting browsers know to resize the image to fit the page on every device. As an example, the full code would look like: This will keep your images from blocking text or other parts of the page on devices where they outgrow the section of the page you want them to stay contained within.   7. Make Clickable Elements Large Enough for Mobile. Another important component of good mobile-friendly website design is thinking about how people use their mobile devices. Clicking a small button on a computer is easy with the pointer that you have total control over and that can get very specific in what it points to. On a mobile device though, you have to be able to “click” that same button by touching it with your finger. If a link or button is too small, or worse, if you have different links located too close together, your users will struggle to get the links to work. When designing your web pages, make sure you test each one out on a small mobile device to confirm that all the links and buttons are easy to use.   8. Use Visual Hierarchies. This relates back to the goals you developed for each page of your website. Every page will include the most important information that you want people to notice, as well as additional information and design elements that matter, but aren’t of the same level of importance. In order to make sure that every visitor on every device sees the most important parts of the page before moving on, develop a visual hierarchy for each web page. The most important elements need to go at the top so they show up for everybody, and the other parts of the page can fall further down for the people interested enough to keep scrolling to see the whole page.   9. Make Your Site Accessible. Your visitors don’t all interact with the web in the same way. While that’s useful to consider in general, it’s an even more important point to remember when designing for people with different types of disabilities. An important web design tip to keep in mind during the design process is, therefore, to aim for inclusivity and accessibility. The Web Accessibility Initiative has outlined a number of Accessibility Principles for web designers to honor when creating their websites. The people who benefit most from accessible web design may be in the minority, but some are very likely in your target audience. By building an accessible website, you open your brand up to a wider audience and can build goodwill with a community that’s often underserved.   10. Stick to Design Standards. Have you ever been confused by a website that has its menu in a different spot than you’re used to? Or had a hard time closing a pop up that had the X in a weird spot? While web designers can often benefit from finding ways to be creative or unique, there are certain  web design standards that  define how people interact with websites and what they expect to find. When you move away from these norms, you risk creating confusion and a negative experience for your customers. A few of the main standards it’s a best practice to stick with include:     Putting your logo in the top left     Putting contact information in the top right     Having your main menu stretch across the top of the screen     Putting your value proposition high up on the home page     Including a CTA high up on the home page     Adding a search feature to the header When you think about it, everything on that list is probably exactly what you expect to see when you visit a website. If you’re going to venture away from these standards, make sure you think thoughtfully about why and make sure you’re not creating unnecessary confusion in the process.   A Good Design Makes for a Good Website Your web design determines how your website will look and feel to the people that visit it. Getting it right is paramount to the success of your website . Take some time to understand the main web design best practices and create a website that people will find useful and intuitive. 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