Website project initial idea

(Medium, 2017)

 When designing a website many factors have to be taken into consideration a few of these are layout, user-friendliness, appeal, content, pages, payment methods, SEO.

Layout - The website needs to have a easy to navigate layout with hyperlinks in the form of buttons to help users navigate to different parts of the website, the layout cannot have too many features as this may drastically increase the load times which in turn will lead to the loss of potential customers.

User-Friendliness - User Friendliness is one of the most important things to consider when building a website, the website needs to be easy to navigate and may include a search bar so the user can search for anything on the website easily. The website should be adaptive to the platform the user uses to browse the website. Major search engines such as Google asserted that they take user-friendliness seriously and websites that a more mobile friendly are ranked higher in the search results, this is because mobile phones are the widest platform currently.

Appeal - We also have to come up with something that sets us apart from competitors, a lot of research can be done into competitors sites and examine their strengths and weaknesses using tools such as Google Analytics to come up with plans and strategies to gain more traffic.

Content - The content of the site should always be high quality and updating regularly to keep customers coming back. Taking professional pictures of products you are selling will psychologically boost the likelihood a purchase will be made. 

Pages - Large online stores and websites often contain many webpages the homepage, payment page and customer support page are a few examples. If all these features were crammed into one page the website would look unprofessional and not to appeal to the consumer so it is necessary to have multiple pages but not too many.

Payment methods - Customers expect a secure payment method else ways they would not make the payment due to safety reasons.

SEO - We need to keep Search Engine Optimisation in mind when designing the website, good meta tags and meta descriptions may not directly boost you up to the top of the search list but a good meta description will get potential customers into your website increasing traffic which boosts the website up the search list.

References:

Xia, V. (2017) Beginner’s guide: How to learn web design at home, Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@Vincentxia77/beginners-guide-how-to-learn-web-designing-at-home-796c01b8c0c2 (Accessed: January 29, 2023).