Strategy, UX, Development and Design: Elements of a Successful Website
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 5:14 am
Creating a website isn’t a siloed practice that simply revolves around visual design and web development – it also encompasses other fields such as SEO, digital strategy, user experience and content creation. It’s the overlap of these various fields of expertise combined for a truly engaging, useful and effective website that keeps users coming back for more.
Your website should drive your business forward—not hinder it. Whether you’re considering a website redesign or just need a refresh, let’s dive into the different elements that make some websites more successful than others.
1. START WITH STRATEGY
It may seem obvious that you should start the web development process with strategy, but unfortunately, this area is often glossed over. So before we dive into the technical elements of website development, we need to first address the overarching strategy – things like goals, audiences, branding, and measurement.
SETTING SITE OBJECTIVES
It’s like a reason why you’re developing a new architects mailing lists website . Do you need to update your website to feel more like your new brand? To accommodate a major change in your business? To increase conversion rates?
It’s not uncommon for websites to be built without a clear goal, and this often results in poor user experience, bloated web design, and a lack of conversion rate optimization. Setting goals from the start informs your digital strategy and provides a roadmap for important decisions about site content, user flows, and design. Is your website impacting your bottom line? If not, it’s possible that it’s partly due to a lack of clear goals.
While identifying your goal can start as a macro exercise, it’s also applicable on a smaller scale, such as individual pages. A good exercise is to ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this page?” and “Can the user take action?” If you can’t identify the goal of your content, your user will likely have the same challenge.
DEFINING YOUR AUDIENCE
Just like your goals, target audiences should be identified and communicated to your team. Identifying this information as early as possible is important because it informs the overarching strategy that guides the website’s information architecture, how best to achieve the website’s goals, the content of the website, and of course, the user interface design.
In some cases, companies will have multiple audiences they need to plan for. For example, a university website may need to speak to prospective students, current students, multiple departments, and alumni.
What if your target audience represents a broad and diverse segment and you don’t have more specific demographic information at your disposal? This is where research can greatly help your business uncover data about your customers. This can take the form of surveys, market research, and competitive analysis, to name a few.
MARK
This one goes without saying, but you need to make sure your brand is clearly defined. Things like brand guidelines help keep everyone “on-brand” and allow people with less experience with your brand (think freelancers or agency partners) to come and go as needed.
MEASUREMENT
Last but not least, you’ll need to make sure you’ve thought about how you measure success. This ties in closely with your goals, but goes a step further to make sure you’re capturing data in the right way. Do you have the right tags firing? How is this conversion being tracked? Is the information in Google Analytics correct?
Assuming you have all these fundamental elements, you can move on to the fun part.
2. DIGITAL STRATEGY
There are a lot of things that contribute to a great website—many of which dovetail into each other. For example, SEO is largely affected by UX ( user experience ) and content strategy , and UX deals with everything from information architecture to web design. There’s a lot to unpack, but we’ll cover the biggest players here.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Information architecture is the structural design of your website's information hierarchy, from your sitemap conventions, home page, labeling and categorization of your site, to the various types of content you have throughout your site.
A well-structured information architecture not only supports your strategy, it can greatly impact your user experience and your SEO (like I said, it’s all connected). The best combination of important pages and topics leads to a more intuitive user experience, which leads search engines to prioritize your site.
The most important example of information architecture is your website’s navigation. Are there opportunities to simplify and better align top-level menu items with your company’s core goals? Does the navigation hierarchy make sense or does it require some reorganization? These questions are important to ask early in the process, as they can be costly to address later in the project.
Your website should drive your business forward—not hinder it. Whether you’re considering a website redesign or just need a refresh, let’s dive into the different elements that make some websites more successful than others.
1. START WITH STRATEGY
It may seem obvious that you should start the web development process with strategy, but unfortunately, this area is often glossed over. So before we dive into the technical elements of website development, we need to first address the overarching strategy – things like goals, audiences, branding, and measurement.
SETTING SITE OBJECTIVES
It’s like a reason why you’re developing a new architects mailing lists website . Do you need to update your website to feel more like your new brand? To accommodate a major change in your business? To increase conversion rates?
It’s not uncommon for websites to be built without a clear goal, and this often results in poor user experience, bloated web design, and a lack of conversion rate optimization. Setting goals from the start informs your digital strategy and provides a roadmap for important decisions about site content, user flows, and design. Is your website impacting your bottom line? If not, it’s possible that it’s partly due to a lack of clear goals.
While identifying your goal can start as a macro exercise, it’s also applicable on a smaller scale, such as individual pages. A good exercise is to ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this page?” and “Can the user take action?” If you can’t identify the goal of your content, your user will likely have the same challenge.
DEFINING YOUR AUDIENCE
Just like your goals, target audiences should be identified and communicated to your team. Identifying this information as early as possible is important because it informs the overarching strategy that guides the website’s information architecture, how best to achieve the website’s goals, the content of the website, and of course, the user interface design.
In some cases, companies will have multiple audiences they need to plan for. For example, a university website may need to speak to prospective students, current students, multiple departments, and alumni.
What if your target audience represents a broad and diverse segment and you don’t have more specific demographic information at your disposal? This is where research can greatly help your business uncover data about your customers. This can take the form of surveys, market research, and competitive analysis, to name a few.
MARK
This one goes without saying, but you need to make sure your brand is clearly defined. Things like brand guidelines help keep everyone “on-brand” and allow people with less experience with your brand (think freelancers or agency partners) to come and go as needed.
MEASUREMENT
Last but not least, you’ll need to make sure you’ve thought about how you measure success. This ties in closely with your goals, but goes a step further to make sure you’re capturing data in the right way. Do you have the right tags firing? How is this conversion being tracked? Is the information in Google Analytics correct?
Assuming you have all these fundamental elements, you can move on to the fun part.
2. DIGITAL STRATEGY
There are a lot of things that contribute to a great website—many of which dovetail into each other. For example, SEO is largely affected by UX ( user experience ) and content strategy , and UX deals with everything from information architecture to web design. There’s a lot to unpack, but we’ll cover the biggest players here.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Information architecture is the structural design of your website's information hierarchy, from your sitemap conventions, home page, labeling and categorization of your site, to the various types of content you have throughout your site.
A well-structured information architecture not only supports your strategy, it can greatly impact your user experience and your SEO (like I said, it’s all connected). The best combination of important pages and topics leads to a more intuitive user experience, which leads search engines to prioritize your site.
The most important example of information architecture is your website’s navigation. Are there opportunities to simplify and better align top-level menu items with your company’s core goals? Does the navigation hierarchy make sense or does it require some reorganization? These questions are important to ask early in the process, as they can be costly to address later in the project.