Save yourself hours of wasted time and frustration searching for a web design checklist for best practice and use ours! We have pulled together all the information that you need to have in order to produce stunning web design.

Whether you are building your website alone or working with a professional web developer, knowing what comprises best practice allows you to understand what is going on during each step of the process.

How you lay out your website determines not only the general overall look but how visitors will react when they view it. Your website has to work hard, producing plenty of leads so that you can convert them into paying customers.

If your web design isn’t doing this, then you know something is wrong with the layout and design.

Web design best practices checklist

Here is our take on the ultimate way to design your website:

Create with your audience in mind –

Before the hard work of design begins, you need to think about your target audience. Your web designers cannot construct the best possible site for you if they don’t know who it needs to relate to or what viewers are going to be looking for. It’s all about creating a unique and enjoyable UX that pulls on people’s emotions and attitudes.

Focus will be on your product or service and the way that it has a meaningful relationship with those who need it. To give you some idea of how this can vary, whilst Millennials are drawn to the navigational experience, Generation Z’s are more focused on the actual product or service. You can see how getting your audience wrong can impact dramatically upon the ability of your website to work well.

If you are unsure as to how to move forward, create a buyer persona and furnish them with the attributes that your ideal customer would have.

Compress those images

Whilst your site needs high resolution images, they will slow the site down if they’re not compressed. As well as being of a high quality, make them unique. Using stock images all the time can make things look a little ‘samey’ so try using your own images if they look good or opt for those taken by a photographer. Whilst images attract, viewers won’t wait to look at them so if your site doesn’t load immediately, you will lose them. The best format to save in is JPEG as this retains the best quality, even when compressed.

Design your content carefully

How do you think your buyer persona would best want to view content? Should there be a high use of white space, more images than text or weighted on the side of quality written content? Ask your web designer which fonts will work best, at the same time thinking about the use of colour and spacing. Your website should be responsive which means that it will look equally as good on a mobile as on a desktop or a tablet. Failure to attend to this can leave viewers struggling, having to zoom in and out on their phones and losing patience.

Don’t be afraid of using white space

You may have loads of beautifully written text or images that you want to showcase on your website, but don’t pile them on too heavily. Here, less is definitely more. Err on the side of white space so that viewers are not overly distracted. Use white space powerfully to command attention and enhance important features.

Use CTAs carefully

CTAs (call to actions) are necessary but spreading them all over your website in multiple locations can look desperate. They are used to convert customers so place them sparingly. Littering CTAs all over the pages and side bars can be just as annoying as adverts. What will viewers do in this case? Leave your site. The moral of the story here is, don’t take the risk. If you use the services of a content writer, your brief should include for cautious and careful use of CTAs.

Consistency is King!

Make sure that all of your pages look similar and follow the same theme. There is nothing worse than going from page to page and finding that some look way different. This can put viewers off and even make them think that they have landed on a different site. Consistency is essential when it comes to the layout of your website. Keep the layout on each page the same and don’t jump from one style to another.

Keep in mind your perfect buyer persona

As your business grows (and your website), don’t lose sight of who you are communicating with. Your ideal buyer persona should be central to all that you do, hence your site should be built around them.

Always remember what they desire and need and ensure that your website appeals to them. Your site is there to keep them engaged; they need to love the presentation and stick around long enough to buy. Even more important, they should keep coming back for more, time and time again.

If you struggle with what your persona should be like and are unsure of their characteristics, carry out some market research or if you don’t have the skills to do this, find a web design agency that can help.

Your first port of call should always be your website design agency.

Once you are fully in the picture with regard to your perfect customer, you can do everything possible to make your web design talk to them in the right language.

When it comes down to web design best practice, you now know exactly what to do. No matter your type of company or what you offer to your buyers, being aware of how to do things the right way is essential.

Our web design checklist for best practice puts you in the know without you having to do any of the hard work or spend time on long and lengthy research.