A website is the face of your company and the most effective way to convert a client. Without a well-designed website, you can’t start an effective digital marketing campaign. Meridian Social offers website development services for all types of businesses – B2B, B2C, B2B2C, SaaS, and E-Commerce. We are versed in HTML, PHP, Bootstrap, Magento, WordPress, Shopify, and BigCommerce.
Website design and development is the process of building a website from scratch and maintaining it to ensure it’s functional over a long period. However, website design and development can be broken down into two different processes.
The first one is the designing of the front-end, where the developers and designers work together to develop the layout and interactivity of the site using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The other one is the management of the back-end, where the developers and engineers ensure that the site, its server, and the database function smoothly.
While in website design, where the designer takes care of the design principles like balance, contrast, emphasis, consistency, and unity, a developer focuses on providing efficient programming solutions. Both the processes are equally important for the functioning of your business website.
Let’s find out why you, a business owner, should care about the design of your website.
When your audience lands on your site, you want them to have a great experience getting acquainted with your brand. Believe it or not, they will judge your products and services by the state of your business website. It is in these first few seconds that you want them to get hooked. If they don’t find your website appealing, they will not trust your products and services and might even quit your site to land on your competitors’.
All your marketing strategies will revolve around your business website. It is therefore important to have a highly functional site. If you are running a high-performance Search Engine Optimization campaign but do not have a high-quality website, all your marketing efforts will be an exercise in futility. To put it in simple words, you need to have a website that is SEO friendly.
As mentioned earlier, your target audience will judge the quality of your products and services by how good your business website looks. Your website is a salesperson. If the site looks modern, inviting, and has highly valuable content, your target audience will have a great time interacting with it. If your audience finds you interesting, they might trust you and convert for your business.
Building a brand from scratch requires consistency over a long period of time. This is important because you want your audience to get familiar with your brand and get used to your style. A well-designed website will have the same fonts, layouts, and creative styles across all pages. Not just that, to build solid brand recognition, you will need to stay consistent across all online channels. A lack of consistency will significantly increase the bounce rate on your site.
You might decide to not care about website design. But, other players in your industry are already utilizing website design to get ahead of the competition. If you already have a website, it is the best time to get rid of the outdated content and unprofessional website design today. This simple decision will go a long way in improving your brand’s online presence.
When we talk about back and services, we are referring to the content management systems that go on to support the entire website development process. The quality of the backend services of your site is crucial to the impact it has on your target audience. Most of the backend elements are user-facing. Thus, it is important to establish a strong foundation for your site which can be accomplished by selecting a reliable content management system. We provide our clients with multiple content management systems to choose from.
You don’t want to overwhelm your target audience when they land on your website. It is therefore highly recommended to have a clean design for all web pages on your site. We focus on things that matter the most. High-quality text and creative content will only influence your audience if the overall design matches their expectations. This also makes it important to understand your target audience which will require in-depth market research. The bottom line is that you have to focus on designing a clean, appealing, and intuitive website design.
You can never go wrong with a highly optimized web site navigation. It is quite usual to find visitors getting confused with a site’s navigation. However, if your website design confuses the visitors, they will immediately leave the site and might even never come back. You don’t want that to happen. Therefore, you have to make sure the navigation on your site is user friendly and purposeful. Keep things simple and efficient at the same time. We rigorously test the website navigation before making your site live.
Today, adding visual elements has become a staple among companies that are looking to improve engagement on their site. This is also because customers are 10 times more likely to interact with graphical content. Visual elements help you break the ice when a unique customer lands on your site. It gives you an opportunity to reflect your personality and at the same time, influence the purchasing behavior of the visitor. However, you must not ignore the fact that the above will only happen when the quality of the visuals is above par.
As we mentioned earlier, your website is essentially a salesperson that works 24/7. To make that salesperson effective, you will need to put a strong, highly captivating copy on your site. A good copy will always keep your audience engaged and improve the retention rate of your site. They will be more inclined towards reading through the information and learning more about your products and services. Not just that, it also gives you an opportunity to show your style and personality while providing the audience with high-quality, valuable information.
Unique visitors landing on your site are more often than not looking for solutions or answers to questions. To help them reach the requested web page or the piece of information, you will need to put Call To Action buttons. Well-placed CTA buttons influence your audience to take the next step. It is a highly effective tool that will help you drive your target audience towards conversion.
What’s the use of designing a high-quality website if your target audience cannot use it in the first place? Making your site easily accessible to your target audience is a huge challenge to overcome, especially when website owners are tempted to add more and more functionalities. Adding functionalities and integrations to your site will naturally make it slow. We focus on improving the page speed and lowering the website loading time when constructing websites. This is an important factor because no one likes waiting for pages to load.
Responsiveness to different browsers is equally important. This is because while your target audience will try accessing your website from different devices, they will also use different web browsers as well. If your website isn’t compatible with a web browser, you are going to exclude a big portion of the internet users. The financial ramifications of ignoring a widely used web browser are huge and cannot be overlooked.
Google is constantly pushing towards a mobile-first ecosystem. It is therefore important for you to optimize your website design for different mobile devices. Since Google has introduced the mobile-first indexing in 2018, ignoring mobile responsiveness on your site can even result in a penalty and major losses in revenue.
One of the most important factors for effective website design and development is security. You have to ensure that your website has the correct security certificates and follows the required security protocols. If you ignore website security, you are putting your target audience’s privacy in jeopardy.
The very first step of designing any business website is to understand what you want out of your site. We will have a thorough discussion about the purpose, main goals, and the target audience you want to focus on while we design the site for you. Once we have a complete understanding of the project requirements, it will become easier for us to recommend solutions and resources for the effective completion of the project. Most importantly, the website designing goals should align with your business goals.
Now that we have all the information about your business and your requirements, we will begin with the different stages of the website development cycle. Based on the information gathered in the first step, we will create a sitemap for you. The sitemap contains information about how different web pages are connected with each other. In other words, it will be a skeletal or an outline of how the inner structure of your website will look like. Once the sitemap is approved, we will begin working on the wireframe. The wireframe or mock-up is nothing but a visual representation of your website’s user interface. Along with this, we will take care of the technical aspects of website design and development. Meaning, the programming languages, framework, and content management system that we will use to effectively design and develop your site.
Once the Framework is approved, we will begin working on designing the page layouts. In this process, we will be focusing on the development of visual content that will go on your site. We will have to take care of the brand guidelines as well as the target audience when designing the layout of your site. While the developers and engineers will work on strengthening the back end of your site, the designers will be working on the website layout in this step.
Now that we are done with the website layout and the placement of visual elements, we can start working on content writing. This is an important part of the process because without written content on your site, it will become difficult for you to communicate with your visitors. We will work on developing a high quality and compelling website copy that will speak to your target audience. We have highly experienced content writers that will produce catchy headlines and crisp website content.
In this step, we will begin putting together all the different elements we have designed until now. This is the step where you will see the website taking shape. We create the pages according to the sitemap and ensure that the framework and content management system are implemented successfully. While creating the web pages, we give great attention to Search Engine Optimisation as well. We will create a great foundation for your upcoming SEO campaigns.
Our team of experienced website designers and developers work together when we test your website. We have a thorough approach and we put it to use when testing and reviewing different elements of your website. Our team needs to work together in this step so that each and every element created in the previous steps are quality checked. Once we are done with the quality check, we will share the website with you. The moment you give us a green light, we will upload your website to the server and make it go live.
Our job doesn’t end there. The most important part of any website design and development process is maintenance. We always design websites so that it is easier for us to make changes in the future. This is important because every industry today is changing at a lightning speed. We have to maintain the website so that it is easier for you to stay competitive on the internet. We make sure that your website is up to date and all regular updates are installed to keep your site from potential threats.
