Website designers tips and tricks

Get the best tips and tricks from online website designers. Website design is a specialism within the graphic world. The reason for this is that in addition to branding and creativity, a website also needs to take into account functionality and the so-called 'user interaction'. Also, not everything that a website designer comes up with and makes can easily be built by website developers.

Get advice or support from an experienced website designer from CallTheONE. They are online to give you simple advice or to design a complete website. They work remotely via a live video connection and you pay per minute in the first instance. The first minute is free and you are free to make any price-fixing agreement you want after the first video call.

Websites are becoming increasingly important for every type of business. It not only represents your brand, but it is also your front door and for most companies, it is their shop window. Whether you have an e-commerce site or an informative site, the website needs to look neat and tidy. Web designers have specialized in converting your wishes into a design that suits your target group and objectives. On request, they can start by first creating a sketch of your website on paper or on screen

How do you become a website designer?

You can become a website designer by learning a combination of design skills and technical skills. A website needs more than just a few nice pictures and texts. By attending workshops, webinars, or taking private lessons you can quickly become a good website designer.

How important is the technique when creating websites?

Due to the rise of all kinds of free online tools, as a website designer, you need less and less technical knowledge. At least, when it comes to simple sites. For the more complex sites that consist of a lot of pages or multiple languages, it is important that you have sufficient technical knowledge. If you want to rank high in Google it's also important to have some development skills.

To be able to rank in Google, your site needs to be fast enough and built in such a way that Google can easily crawl the content.

What do you need to pay attention to when designing a website?

A website must, of course, represent your brand. Cohesion between your brand and what the site looks like is therefore obvious. This is easy to test if you have a corporate identity manual, but if you don't have one, there should be enough promotional material to distract your brand from it. If you don't have this either, most web designers will want to develop a corporate identity first before they start the website design.

The 3 step-by-step plan before you start a website design

1. Objective:

In order to create the right graphics website design for a website, the objective of the site must first be clear and therefore unambiguous. What exactly is the purpose of the site and what do you want the visitor to do?

Examples are:

• Selling products
• Provide information
• Compare price or product
• A special temporary promotion
• Etc

2. Target group and user-flow:

Who will visit the site and how do you expect them to behave? Do they want to see a lot of information or directly view a product or read an article? But at least as important is to know how they get to your site and what they already know about your company or offer before they get to the site.

3. User interaction

How do you want visitors to navigate your site, how 'intrusive' or how 'guiding' do you want to be? Some sites can only be abandoned after 20 pop-ups and other sites don't even ask for your e-mail address.

Website designers and writers

Writers are good at writing and designers are good at designing. Rarely is there a combination of these two skills present in a person. It is therefore wise to hire a good content writer or content marketing specialist who writes all the texts first. On CallTheONE, writers from all over the world are online to get straight to work.

Website design and SEO

A website must be SEO prepared. Graphic designers sometimes want as much image as possible and as little text as possible. Search engines think in exactly the opposite way. Before you have a website designed, it is therefore wise to first consult an SEO specialist via TheONE to see what the site should meet within your SEO objectives. A beautiful site does not have to be a findable site.

Ranking and the structure of your HTML pages

A good example of why technical knowledge is necessary when designing a site is the construction of HTML pages. Each page consists of HTML code that is read by Google. This is not what you see visually, but the underlying code. Google reads the HTML code from left to right and from top to bottom.

If your page first starts with a lot of code and only the text is at the very bottom of the code, Google may have trouble understanding your page and may not rank it high.

Google also looks at the relationship between content (text, images and videos) and code. If a page contains more lines of code than content, it will rarely rank high in the search results.

Ranking and loading time of page

Google finds it important that pages are loaded quickly. This is a factor that determines how high you can rank in the search engine. By using very heavy images and complex code within your website design, a page can become 'too heavy'.

Ranking and your menu

When designing your site, it is important to maintain a clear menu structure. Your menu is one of the first things that Google looks at and the Google crawlers that scan your site use your menu to navigate through your site.

Keep in mind that Google makes pages that can be reached with one click more important than pages that can be reached with more clicks. The more clicks, the lower the page will generally rank.

Incorporating videos into your website design

Videos attract a lot of attention if you incorporate them in your website design in the right way. But videos can also make your website 'heavy', which makes it (too) long before your page is loaded. Make sure you make videos as small as possible by compressing them using professional video editing software.

It is popular to start website pages with a full-screen video. Usually, these are very grainy videos. That's because they are very compressed in order to take as little time as possible to load.

The most common way to use videos in the website design is to place a link from YouTube. On YouTube, you can request the HTML code of a movie to embed it. This means that the video is not physically on your site, but is played from YouTube within your own site.

How do you best display commercial banners within your site?

Commercial banners are a good way to make your blog or site profitable, but how do you best display these banners within your site? It's a fact that most website visitors can be very annoyed by banners. That's why banners are often placed on the right side of the site. The eye scans a page from left to right and by placing the banners on the right, the reader can continue reading undisturbed.

Another commonly used way is to place banners after a certain paragraph. The reader is interested in a subject and just as something important is written, a banner is displayed first. Because the reader likes to read on, he will scroll further and take notice of the banner. If you apply this once in a while, the user will not be bothered very much. If you do this too often, it becomes annoying.

Website designers and website developers

It is always wise to have a website designer work together with a website developer from the beginning. This way you prevent a creative designer from thinking of things that will take a lot of time to develop later on.

You can also ask WordPress developers on CallTheONE who in turn use existing WordPress templates and adapt them to your wishes.