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A website can be one of the best ways to advertise your business online. It works 24 hours a day and provides your clients and potential clients with different ways to learn more about your business, an easy an increasingly popular way to perform customer service and even a sales platform for your products and services.
It is understandable why a lot of companies and web design platforms work hard at getting more web design projects. However, whether such a company or platform is suitable for your goals cannot be answered without looking at what you are trying to accomplish.
Website Builders
If you need a simple website, that function more or less like a business card, most web design platforms offer good, affordable ways to accomplish that. Such a website can be found when someone enters the address in the browser bar. It is usually composed of a couple simple pages and does not bring many leads on its own. Expanding the website and adding features to it comes at an exponentially increasing price. In most cases, SEO relies on a well designed and structured website or digital property.
CMS
You can also design a website using various CMS (Content Management System) platforms. The most popular CMS is WordPress. You can use templates to easily design a simple website. You can also install plugins (code snippets) that will add almost any type of imaginable feature to your website. The downside to using WordPress is that it has a steep learning curve, the more so if you are trying to add complex features and optimizations. It also requires constant maintenance and updates.
Web Design Best Practices
To decide what is the best way to design your website, you first need to define what you want that website to do for you.
Where To Design A Cheap, Very Basic Website
A simple, cheap website can be designed by almost anyone. Modern builders make it easy to add a couple of images and a few lines of text. You will still need to pay for the domain name (the address you type in to access the website), the hosting (where the website files live) and whatever fee the website builder platform charges, if any.
How To Design A Small Business Website
A more complex website can easily rack up thousands of dollars in development and coding fees. Unless you have a big web design budget, it is always better to use existing libraries and code snippets, such as the WordPress plugins, because they are generally inexpensive. The alternative is hiring a website developer to code everything from scratch and that can be very expensive.
There are advantages to having a well-designed website, not only expenses. While no one can honestly guarantee 100% accurately the future performance of your website, a well designed and well-marketed website can pay for itself. Depending on your clients’ LTV (LifeTime Value), competitiveness of your industry, and your business’s performance, a website can pay for itself as fast as a from a couple of months to an year.
These are some of the best practices when designing a website:
- for new businesses, make sure that you have the money and time to invest in a website
- decide what you want to accomplish with a website
- make sure that the website will be responsive and easy to view on any type of device
- make sure that your website’s text is unique. A lot of designers use templates to design their clients’ website. If those templates are customized enough, they can look 100% unique and can be a money saver because not everything is designed from scratch. However, when it comes to text, there is a world of difference between using well written, original content or text copied from somewhere else, which can also create legal issues
- choose a color palette and stick with it
- choose 1-2 fonts. Always use legible fonts that are easy to read
- make sure any visitor can tell what your website is about at a glance
- when using a designer, make sure you provide them with digestible, bite-sized information about your business and your industry, in general
- each page and each section of a page should have a well defined purpose. Because that is how it’s done does not qualify as a well defined purpose
