Many websites are created each and every single day, making competition more and more difficult. To compete in today's landscape, just having an optimized website isn't at all enough. You must now consider a number of factors when you want to have your website designed. These factors include modern design and content, usability and conversion, aswell as search and social media.
Not only that SEO now has an on-page and off-page optimization as a consideration, the way people views and consumes content also has changed. The new modern design and navigation should be built into the architecture of newly designed websites.
To make a new website work for your business, it's essential that a marketing approach is implemented. This involves technical, search, social, usability, and design teams. Objectives are set by the business so that your site reflects not just your brand but also meets your business objectives, conversion goals, visions and missions.
Understanding your market is knowing how to approach your clients, potential users, and competitive environment. This is a large project management task that should be implemented to your design and build process to ensure that your website matches what potential customers are looking for.
There are many websites on the World Wide Web that are beautifully designed but unable to deliver what they are intended to. This is because the information isn't visible, or isn't at all there. It's probably slow, poorly structured, difficult to navigate, and don't show the appropriate place on the search engine's search result page.
On the other hand, websites that are well optimized can look outdated and less engaging for users. But these websites are focused on quality and content.
The Approach of Modern Web Design
Modern web design involves many approaches. And SEO, as well as content, are the core of the design and build process. This modern design has a balance of both:
- Information architecture, or the labeling of website content to support usability, and
- Technical architecture that relates to more SEO related labeling such as indexation, canonicalization, and robots exclusion.
Design
As stated before, there are many websites that look outdated but able to thrive successfully in their competition. Many other websites that are less successful may have disproportionate amount of time spent on marketing, looks, and over optimization. In reality, a website needs to have balanced usability and clean, simple, engaging design.
Finding the correct balance between a modern design that is simple in nature, yet informative and engaging for users, and maintainable for SEO performance, is the foundation of a website's success.
One of the biggest challenges designers face, is visual representation, presented by HTML and CSS elements. A traditional designer normally has a totally different view of how a website will look compared to a marketer or SEO person. One looks for beauty while the other looks for the ability for it to be "found", "crawled" and "read".
Usability
Inbound traffic is key to a marketers goals and SEO represents a large part of that activity. It is important to blend SEO strategy and web design with actually usability.
Before, web projects were built with SEO, content, design and usability as sub projects. Usability was focused purely on the user interface, accessibility, and technical purposes. A fragmented relationship with marketers focused on conversion-oriented design was a common occurrence.
Modern marketing and design utilizes both SEO and usability skill sets and for many the usability with a balanced SEO that can be done with an effective project management.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the place where marketing and technical departments should align together.
Modern marketers and designers evolve this relationship, it is essential that core on-site SEO principles are built into technical architecture. Artistic influence needs to be balanced with search engine friendly structure.
Content
Content is what connects every element of the design and build process. Content is the center to everything in both technical and a marketing perspective. All good design should be focused around quality content.
A content should be clear and relevant in an easy to read format. Using white space can emphasis different aspects of the content. After a content is created, you need to utilize sales and marketing assets to make the content easy to find among the masses of other related content on the World Wide Web.
Integration
integration between all foundation is the key to success when building a website that works for your business.
As people consume content on a combination of desktop, mobile and tablet devices, the integration of your website design across multiple devices and platforms is becoming very important.
Responsive web design involves having one website for every screen and for many is seen as the future of web design.
Social media also plays huge role for a website's performance. And this is far more than just adding social buttons to a website. It is important to integrate and link campaigns from social media networks, mainly from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn so that people engage more on your site. Ensure you providing "Share" options on your website which can also give you organic links and traffic.
Conclusion
A website is made by humans for other humans to read. Websites are made to be seen not by just search engines, but ultimately for people. Modern day design needs to have a balance between an effective content and SEO elements in both technical and information architecture.
Modern day web design success requires a multi-function, multi-skilled approached to ensure maximum impact for your business.