While WordPress offers you the tools necessary to build a high-performing website, the skills and experience of your WordPress web development team play a significant role in the results you achieve. If your website isn’t built according to website design and development best practices, it may not rank well on search engines and deliver the exceptional user experience necessary to grow your business.

Fortunately, there are a variety of steps you can take to optimize the results of your WordPress website. There are two different types of improvements you can make to ensure your website performs at a high level – SEO improvements and performance optimization improvements. Both are critical to the success of your website, and to ensure these improvements are made using industry best practices, it’s important to work with a web design and development company that has extensive experience working on WordPress websites.

How Does SEO Elevate the Success of Your Website?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process used to ensure your website ranks well on search engines such as Google. Effective SEO will improve your exposure for searches that are relevant to the products and services you offer. Without the improved visibility associated with SEO, it will be extremely challenging for your audience to find your website.

Implementing SEO best practices with your WordPress website will deliver several important benefits:

• Provides a much more cost-effective way to drive traffic to your website compared with paid ads
• Delivers actionable data that will drive your long-term digital marketing strategy
• Improves the ROI of your digital marketing efforts
• Drives high-quality traffic to your website
• Targets individuals at every stage of the buying funnel
• Improves your ability to generate qualified leads that will turn into long-term customers/clients

Learn more about Webolutions’ SEO Services for WordPress Websites

How Does Performance Optimization Elevate the Success of Your Website?

Performance optimization refers to the process used to improve the website speed to provide a more streamlined and efficient user experience. Your website speed plays a significant role in its success. Approximately 40% of users will leave a website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less, and many of those visitors won’t return to your website again. Therefore, you’re losing a tremendous amount of traffic if you have a slow website.

When your website speed is optimized, it will also improve your SEO results. Site speed is one of the ranking factors used in Google’s algorithm since it plays a major role in the overall user experience provided by your website. Therefore, focusing on performance optimization will not only benefit the visitors to your website, but it will also make it easier for your target audience to find you on search engines.

8 Tips to Improve SEO Results on Your WordPress Website

There are a variety of steps you can take to improve the SEO results of your WordPress website. Many of these actions require technical expertise and should be performed by an SEO specialist on your WordPress web design and development team.

Conduct Extensive Keyword Research

In order to improve your search rankings, you must first understand the keywords people are using to search for the products and services you offer. This will allow you to write comprehensive content that addresses the information your audience is searching for. The best way to determine the proper keywords to target is to conduct keyword research.

There are two different types of keywords:

• Short-tail keywords – As the name implies, short-tail keywords are usually shorter in length – one to three words long – and comprise the generic terms that cover a topic. These terms are much more competitive and generate larger search volumes, but they can be more challenging to rank for since they are targeted by well-established websites with high levels of authority.
• Long-tail keywords – Long tail keywords consist of longer phrases, often full questions, that people search for. These keywords have less competition due to their specificity, which makes them easier to rank for. In addition, they typically generate higher quality traffic since the people searching for these terms are looking for information that more closely aligns with the pain points addressed by your products and services.

An effective keyword strategy will consist of a blend of short-tail and long-tail keywords, where the short-tail keywords are addressed on comprehensive web pages and the long-tail keywords are addressed with supporting blog posts.

Create High-Quality Content

One of the most important steps you can take to improve the SEO results of your WordPress website is to consistently publish high-quality content that is keyword rich and addresses the needs of your target audience. Quality content will improve your website’s authority and help improve your rankings for the target keywords you identified in your keyword research.

The key is to put the effort into creating great content rather than simply pumping out mediocre content that fails to truly provide your readers with the detailed information they need. Not only will quality content improve user engagement, but it is valued more highly by Google. In fact, high-quality, people-first content that delivers the helpful information your readers are seeking is one of the factors included in Google’s ranking algorithms.

The following tips will help you create the high-quality content necessary to elevate your SEO results:

• Do your research – Each piece of content you create should be well-researched, in-depth and answer a specific question or topic that is relevant to your audience.
• Make it original – If you simply repeat the talking points said by others, you won’t be adding much new value with your content. Make sure you provide a unique perspective that isn’t found in other content on the same topic.
• Structure content so it’s easy to read – Use clear headings to separate your content into well-organized sections that flow well. Use simple language that your audience will easily understand. Use short paragraphs instead of large blocks of text, and add bullet lists where appropriate to make the content easier to scan.
• Write with your target keywords in mind – While you want to avoid keyword stuffing, it’s important to have a specific set of keywords in mind for each piece of content you write and make sure you use these keywords throughout the content so that Google will know what the blog is about.

Create Categories to Organize Content

Using categories will make it easier for users to locate the blog posts that are most relevant to the information they’re seeking. Create relevant categories that will help you organize a set of related blog posts associated with a broad topic. By keeping your categories broad, you’ll be able to include blogs covering a wider range of topics.

Check the WordPress Visibility Settings

When you build a website on WordPress, you’ll have the option to determine whether search engines can index your website. Sometimes, a WordPress web developer will have this feature set to “No” during the development process, especially if the website is being built directly on the hosting platform. Always make sure the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box is unchecked before the website launches to ensure it will be found by search engines.

Use an SEO-Friendly WordPress Theme

One of the benefits of building your website in WordPress is that you have access to a variety of WordPress themes. These themes consist of a collection of templates, code files and style sheets that dictate the way your website is displayed to the end user. When you use an SEO-friendly and performance-optimized WordPress theme, it can significantly improve your ability to rank well on search engines.

SEO-friendly WordPress themes:

• Utilize responsive design to ensure the website displays properly on any device or screen size
• Is built using clean code
• Loads quickly
• Is compatible with other optimization plugins

Perform On-Page Optimization

Each page and blog on your website should be optimized individually to maximize their performance. This involves the following steps:

• Optimizing meta data – Meta titles and meta descriptions are used to help users and search engines understand what the content is about. When optimized properly, these items can boost your rankings and improve your clickthrough rates. Make sure to keep meta titles and meta descriptions short, unique and keyword rich.
• Use internal links – Internal linking strategies provide several important benefits. They improve your website’s authority, make it easier to navigate to relevant pages/blogs, and keep your users on your website longer. Aim for 3-5 relevant internal links on every page/blog.
• Add alt text to images – Image alt text provides a description to help search engines understand what the image is about. Make sure to keep your alt text short, and include a relevant keyword whenever possible.

Use a WordPress SEO Plugin

WordPress offers several SEO plugins that make performing on-page optimization much simpler. These plugins allow you to leverage a variety of tools that will improve your ability to get the most out of your SEO efforts, such as sitemap generators, on-page analysis and schema markup.

Install an SSL Certificate

Website security is another important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm that must be accounted for on your WordPress website. Installing an SSL certificate will encrypt the data transferred between your website and its users’ browser. This makes it harder for hackers to acquire sensitive data such as personal information, login credentials, and payment information.

7 Performance Optimization Tips to Enhance Your Website Results

Even if you take care of all the important SEO actions discussed above, you may not be able to achieve your desired results if your website loads slowly and provides a poor user experience. Due to the importance of having a fast-loading website, it’s critical to also take the steps necessary to optimize your load speed. The following performance optimization tips will help you provide the best possible user experience. As with the SEO tips above, it’s important to have these actions performed by an experienced web developer.

Use a Quality Hosting Provider

Using a quality hosting provider is essential if you want to have a website that loads quickly and functions properly. Your hosting provider stores all your files on their server, so working with a reputable provider will give you peace of mind that this important task is handled properly.

A quality website host will provide a variety of important benefits, including:

• Faster load times
• Servers that are always up and running, minimizing downtime where your website is inaccessible to users
• The scalability necessary to handle spikes in website traffic
• Robust customer support to help you resolve problems quickly
• Guaranteed website security

Optimize Images for Speed

Eye-catching images are an important component to creating an engaging website, but it’s important to be mindful of the file sizes of the images you add to your website. Large, high-resolution images can significantly slow down your website speed and make pages suffer from long loading times.

Fortunately, you don’t need large image files to achieve the desired impact with your users. Your images just need to be sharp enough for people to be able to see what is contained in the image. At some point, the higher image resolution will no longer improve the quality.

To make sure your images don’t slow down your website speed, you should compress your images prior to adding them to the website. This will reduce the file size. WordPress also offers a variety of image optimization plugins that you can use if compressing the image files doesn’t achieve your desired improvement in loading speed.

Use a CDN

If your website targets users in different geographic regions, you may benefit from using a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN uses a variety of data centers in different geographic locations to store copies of your website multiple locations around the world instead of on one server in a static location. The CDN will identify the specific location of each visitor and deliver the copy of the website on the server closest to them to ensure the fastest performance.

Update Your WordPress Themes and Plugins with the Latest Version

Using old, outdated versions of WordPress themes and plugins can negatively impact the functionality of your website and result in slower load times. Using the most updated themes and plugins will deliver several important performance benefits:

• Improve loading speed
• Ensure you have the most up to date security
• Allow you to leverage all the newest features
• Leverage the latest code improvements to optimize performance

Use a Speed-Optimized WordPress Theme

Just as the WordPress theme you choose can impact your SEO results, it can also impact the performance of your website. While you’ll want to choose a theme that aligns with your desired website aesthetics, it’s important to understand that certain themes that use high-resolution images, eye-catching graphical effects and animations can slow down your page load speeds.

To avoid this issue, choose a WordPress theme that contains the functionality you’re looking for while minimizing design elements that can make pages take longer to load.

Use a Caching Plugin

A caching plugin is an important tool that can make your website pages load faster, especially for repeat website visitors. Caching refers to the use of a temporary storage area for frequently accessed website data. Instead of this information being retrieved from the server every time a user requests it, the data can be accessed much more quickly from the cache.

Using a caching plugin reduces the amount of data that must be transferred between the server and a user’s web browser. This speeds up page loading times and improves overall website performance.

Disable and Remove Unused Plugins

One of the biggest benefits to building a website on WordPress is the many plugins and widgets available for customization and advanced functionality. While these plugins can enhance your website in many ways, they can also negatively impact performance if you use too many of them. Since each plugin requires additional functionalities to load whenever a user accesses your website, it can cause pages to load more slowly.

You can often improve your page loading speed and overall website performance by streamlining the plugins you use. Evaluate your existing set of plugins to determine which one you truly need, and which ones aren’t providing a significant benefit. You can often swap out plugins that provide very narrow, specific functionality for more versatile plugins that perform several of the functions you need.

Once you’ve identified any inactive, outdated or unnecessary plugins, you can disable and remove them from your website. You’ll need to disable each plugin before deleting it. This will remove additional code that may be causing website bloat and help improve overall performance.

Webolutions Can Help You Optimize the Results for Your WordPress Website

Whether you are looking to build a new website on WordPress or have an existing WordPress website that isn’t performing well, Webolutions can help you optimize your results and maximize the ROI of your website marketing efforts. As Denver’s leading website design and development company since 1994, we have the experience and expertise necessary to deliver the exceptional results you need to grow your business.

You’ll benefit from our exclusive Websites Right Methodology™, our unique, fully integrated, strategic approach to website development which allows our websites to outperform the marketplace. We’ve developed and refined this methodology over three decades, incorporating the experience, knowledge and lessons learned from building thousands of websites. This creates a far better client experience, increased website marketing performance, and vastly superior business results.

In addition, we build all our websites in WordPress using our proprietary Enhanced WordPress Platform™. This exclusive custom configuration contains a variety of enhancements we’ve made to maximize the functionality and effectiveness of the WordPress content management system (CMS). Our Enhanced WordPress Platform™ ensures you’ll experience optimal load speed and website performance. In addition, our team of SEO specialists will optimize your website to ensure you achieve the search rankings necessary to reach your target audience, increase your website traffic, and attract the high-quality leads necessary to grow and thrive over time.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions provides comprehensive website design and development services to clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post 15 Tips to Optimize the Results for Your WordPress Website appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

New website design and development techniques are emerging all the time, allowing you to more effectively build a website that crafts experiences that will engage your audience, resonate with them on an emotional level, and inspire them to take action. Understanding how to leverage these best practices with your upcoming website redesign project will ensure you end up with a finished product that sets your business up for long-term success.

Before you begin working on your new website, make sure you understand the following web design and development best practices to ensure they get incorporated into your project.

Emphasize User-Centric Design

The most effective websites are designed with the needs of your audience in mind. The more you’re able to deliver a great experience, the more likely you are to increase website traffic, generate high-quality leads, and convert these leads into paying customers. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that a focus on user experience is one of the top website design and development best practices today.

Every aspect of your website should be designed with the user’s experience in mind:

• The banner image and headline, videos, text and images on each page should be structured to engage your users the moment they click on your website.
• The navigation menu should be clear and make it easy for readers to find what they need on your website.
• Every piece of information on the home page should help direct users to the key pages on your website, and each section of this page should clearly convey what your business has to offer and how it can address the pain points of your users.
• Your website developers should use clean code that ensures your website loads extremely fast and prevents impatient users from seeking information elsewhere.

To ensure your website is designed with a good user experience in mind, make sure you clearly define the needs of your website users at the start of the project. Who is your target audience, and what are they trying to accomplish when they visit your website? Are they looking to find a product, conduct research about a subject related to your product/service offering, make a purchase, or achieve some other goal? How familiar are they with your brand and your products/services?

When you understand these user needs in advance, you’ll be able to design a website that provides the exceptional experience your audience desires. Creating detailed buyer personas will help you to more clearly understand the needs, pain points and motivations of each different audience segment you serve.

More Helpful Information for Your: 9 Things to Consider When Redesigning Your Website

Use Design Conventions That Create a Familiar and Predictable Experience

While creativity is a virtue in web design and can help your new website stand out, you may run the risk of confusing users if this creativity breaks from established web design conventions. When this occurs, it can potentially cause people to seek their desired information from a website that provides them with a more familiar and predictable experience.

The following design convention best practices will help make users feel more comfortable navigating your website:

• Place the main navigation menus either across the top of the page or in the upper left corner. This is where users expect to find them.
• Have a clear banner area with a headline that effectively conveys the transformation your business creates for your customers/clients. Most website users will form an impression of your website within 50 milliseconds, so you have very little time to get your message across. Effective banner messaging is critical to ensuring users stay on your website.
• Place your company logo in the upper left corner of the website on all pages. This logo should always link back to the home page so that users can easily return there if they need to.
• Use recognizable icons such as a shopping cart for ecommerce purchases or a magnifying glass for a search bar.
• Use CTA buttons with colors that stand out from the rest of your web design so that users can easily identify them. Have these buttons change colors when users hover over them so they receive feedback that clicking on the button will result in their desired action.
• Place your phone number at the top and bottom of every page on the website. Use a large font that is extremely visible, and make the phone number clickable so that mobile users can call you easily.

Implement an Intuitive Navigation Structure

Users won’t spend much time on your website if they can’t quickly and easily find the information they’re seeking. Therefore, make sure your website has clear, logical navigation that allows users to quickly locate the information they’re looking for.

Your website design and development team should use these best practices when developing your navigation:

• Make sure your navigation menu is easy to find on both desktop and mobile so that all users can access the information they need without difficulty.
• Use common labeling conventions with your top navigation menu such as About, Services, Contact, etc. so that your users know what to expect when they hover over these items.
• Keep your menu names simple, descriptive and relevant to the sections of your website they’re highlighting.
• Use breadcrumbs to track user journeys. This will make it easy for them to retrace their steps if they want to revisit a previous page they viewed.
• Add links to the main content on each page so that users can navigate to relevant pages as they’re reading. Make sure these links have descriptive anchor text so that it’s clear where the links will take the reader.
• Include a search bar at the top right of each page so that users can more easily find the items they’re looking for without perusing each dropdown in your navigation menu. This is especially important if you have pages that aren’t listed in your main navigation dropdown menus.
• Add a navigation footer so users don’t need to scroll up to the top of the page to find the next page they want to read.

Create an Information Hierarchy

Organize the content and other on-page elements in a way that guides users’ attention and highlights the most important information. This will help guide your users to the actions you want them to take in a natural way.

There are two different aspects of an information hierarchy:

• Content hierarchy
• Visual hierarchy

Content hierarchy is directly focused on the written content on the page. An effective content hierarchy will place the most important information at the top of the page and less important information near the bottom.

Visual hierarchy uses the different visual elements on the page to highlight the most important information and guide your users to the places you want them to focus their attention. This is accomplished by using graphical elements such as font size, bold/italic text, spacing and color to emphasize important information on the page.

An effective information hierarchy will use the content hierarchy and visual hierarchy in a complementary manner to create even greater emphasis, making it very obvious to the reader where they should focus their attention.

Make Your Content Easy to Read

We’ve all encountered websites that have hard-to-read content. Whether it’s due to poor contrast between text and background colors, text that is too small to read, large blocks of text, cluttered page layouts, or some other reason, the outcome is generally the same – we spend very little time on those websites and instead seek out the information we need elsewhere.

Having an easy-to-read website is a critical component to creating a good user experience, and it is essential for achieving your desired marketing results. The following best practices will ensure your content is easy to read:

• Use a clear font (not a cursive font) and make sure it is at least 12-point
• Use consistent fonts across the website to create a cohesive feel
• Use different font styles for your content compared to menu items and navigation buttons so that your content will stand out and be easier to read
• Use no more than two or three font sizes throughout the website
• Structure content into shorter paragraphs that are more easily read and scanned than big paragraphs containing large blocks of text
• Use bullet lists whenever possible to make your pages more scannable
• Use contrasting colors for your text and your background to make the text stand out more clearly
• Include strong visual elements on each page to break up the text and improve readability

Design Clear, Compelling Calls to Action (CTAs)

In order for your website to successfully achieve your marketing goals, it needs to be able to persuade your audience to take your desired action. The actions you ask them to take will depend on your specific goals. Some potential goals of your CTAs may be to ask your users to purchase a product, download a lead magnet piece, request a free demo, or sign up for your newsletter.

In order to ensure your CTAs do an effective job compelling your audience to act, make sure to adhere to the following best practices:

• Make your CTA buttons clearly visible by including plenty of white space around them (never bury them within large blocks of text)
• Include relevant CTAs on all pages
• Use consistent CTAs for the same actions to reduce confusion and ensure your audience understands what you’re asking them to do

Implement Responsive Design

Our increasing reliance on smart phones has changed the way people interact with websites. Today, more than 50% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, and this figure will most likely continue rising in the future. Therefore, it’s critical that your website provides a good user experience on all devices (desktop, tablet and mobile). If mobile users find your website hard to navigate or if elements don’t display correctly, they will leave and seek their desired information from a website that provides a better mobile experience.

In order to ensure your website delivers a great mobile experience, you should always use responsive design. Responsive design is an approach to web design and development in which the interface adapts to the device’s layout to ensure usability, navigation and appearance is consistent on all devices. It has been an established web design and development best practice for many years, but it remains one of the most important steps you can take to have a mobile-friendly website that delivers a great experience across all devices.

Implement SEO Best Practices

In order for your website to achieve your marketing goals, your audience must be able to find it. Therefore, implementing SEO best practices as part of your initial web design and development is critical.

The following SEO best practices will help you rank as highly as possible on search engines:

• Conduct keyword research during the initial stages of the web design and development process to identify the right terms to target and create content around.
• Create keyword-optimized content that provides value to your audience.
• Use keyword rich headings and subheadings on all pages to help users and search engines understand the content of each page.
• Include a site map to make it easy for web crawlers to understand your website architecture.
• Use descriptive file names and alt text for images and videos to make it easier for search engines to understand the content of your multimedia.
• Build high-quality backlinks from reputable, relevant websites.
• Optimize your website’s technical elements such as speed, URL structure and internal linking to improve user experience and help search engines crawl and index your website more effectively.

Implement Robust Security Measures

Regardless of whether you accept payments through your website, having good website security is critical. It will protect user data and build trust for your brand. The following best practices will help ensure you maintain good website security:

• Use a secure web host with antivirus and anti-malware software, encryption, server-side firewalls, SSL certificate, CDN availability and on-site security systems
• Use two-factor authentication and require secure passwords that must contain letters, numbers and special symbols
• Prevent unauthorized access by using plugins that limit unsuccessful login attempts

Webolutions Can Build a High Performing Website That Helps Your Business Thrive

Due to the many technical elements associated with building a successful website, it’s important to work with an experienced web design and development company that can ensure every step of the process is handled correctly. Webolutions has been Denver’s leading web design company since 1994, and we can build the high performing website your business needs to grow and thrive.

At Webolutions, we have a team of seasoned web design and development specialists who know how to build your new website according to the latest industry best practices. This ensures your new website will perform well, engage your audience, generate leads and grow your business.

You’ll benefit from our unique Websites Right Methodology™ which provides a fully integrated, strategic approach to website development. This exclusive approach has been refined over nearly 30 years and incorporates the knowledge and lessons learned from designing thousands of websites. Our Websites Right Methodology™ utilizes a meticulous process that creates a far better client experience and results in superior website marketing performance that elevates your business results.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves businesses nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post 9 Website Design and Development Best Practices for 2024 appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

There are different specialists required to ensure the visual and technical aspects of your website work properly – web designers and web developers. While these two professionals work together and have some overlapping roles, their skillsets are somewhat distinct. They play a complementary role in bringing your website to life, and both are equally critical to the success of your digital marketing efforts.

One of the benefits of working with a website design and development company is that there will be optimal levels of collaboration between your website designer and developer. This ensures proper alignment between the website design and website development aspects of the process, allowing you to have a highly performing website that conveys your brand messaging, generates leads, and grows your business.

What Does a Website Designer Do?

What Does a Website Designer Do?

The website designer creates the visual and graphical elements of your website. They focus on the overall layout, aesthetics and usability of the website. Your web designer works to make sure your website is visually appealing and provides a good user experience.

The key elements of your website that are handled by the web designer include:

• Layout and design – The overall layout and design determines how important items such as logos, navigation menus, headers, footers, text, and graphical/video elements are arranged on each page.
• Branding and colors – Your website should convey your company’s brand. This includes any logos, icons, colors and fonts associated with your branding. When these elements are addressed properly on your website, it helps you make a better connection with your audience and ensures your website will look and feel consistent with your other marketing assets.
• Graphics – The graphical elements of your website refer to any photos, illustrations, infographics and other images used. The graphical elements your website designer chooses should complement your branding and enhance the overall layout of your site.
• Hierarchy – The visual hierarchy plays an important role in your ability to make a good impression on users, attract potential leads, collect user information and generate sales. An effective hierarchy will ensure calls to action (CTAs), headers and graphical elements are placed in a way that will most effectively achieve your marketing goals.
• Navigation – One of the most important functions associated with website design is making sure users can easily move around the site to find the info they’re looking for. The navigation structure plays a critical role in accomplishing this function. An effective navigation menu should be highly visible, easily accessible and intuitive. Websites with a poor navigation structure will make it hard for users to find what they need, resulting in a poor experience that may drive visitors away from your site.

Read our Helpful Web Design and Development Articles

Types of Website Designers

Types of Website Designers

There are specializations within the web designer role. Each of these specializations is critical to the success of your website. While some designers may be able to perform all these roles, it is also common for web design and development agencies to have different designers who specialize in each niche:

• User Experience (UX) Designer – The role of the UX designer is to make sure the website is structured in an engaging way that provides a good experience for all visitors interacting with it. In order to accomplish this, they must conduct thorough research into the demographics and needs of your target audience and test a variety of options to arrive at the design that will most effectively engage your audience and keep them coming back again.
• User Interface (UI) Designer – While the UX designer creates the foundation for a strong user experience, the UI designer works to ensure the website aesthetics (the look and feel) is designed in a way that will maximize conversions. This role is responsible for creating the graphics and typography that will optimize the layout of your website. The UI designer also creates a variety of elements such as CTA buttons, dropdown menus, navigational components, data fields and message boxes that make it easier for the user to interact with your website and complete your desired actions.
• Visual Designer – The visual designer combines certain aspects of the UX and UI design roles to make sure the website is both easy to use and visually appealing. They help bring your brand’s style and tone to life in order to improve the user journey.

What Does a Website Developer Do?

The website developer performs the behind-the-scenes coding and programming that allows your website to function properly. The developer works to bring the designer’s ideas to life by constructing the actual website. Website developers must work closely with the designer(s) in order to ensure all the design elements of the website work properly.

The key elements of your website that are handled by the web developer include:

• Programming – Front-end coding languages such as CSS, HTML and JavaScript are used to convert the design into a fully functioning website.
• Optimization – Whether they are building a custom website or working off of a website theme from a third-party platform such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, developers optimize the website by eliminating any unnecessary code that will cause it to be bloated and slow. In addition, the optimization process involves making sure the website will function properly and provide a great experience on all devices (desktop, tablet and mobile) by implementing best practices such as responsive design.
• Structure – Developers are responsible for making sure the coding of your website is structured properly. This improves load time, even for very large, complex websites.
• CMS operations – It’s common to build websites using a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress. When these platforms are used, developers must be able to manipulate the framework of the existing CMS to ensure your website’s design is integrated properly.

Types of Website Developers

Types of Website Developers

As with designers, there are specializations within the web developer role. Each specialization is critical to the success of your website. In general, website developers can be classified into the following roles:

• Front-end developer – Front-end developers are responsible for the coding and programming of the visual elements of the website that the user experiences and interacts with. They bring all of these elements to life in the finished website, ensuring it has the proper look and feel that will resonate with your target audience. This includes just about everything that your website users see, such as colors, text styles, images and graphics, buttons, forms and the navigation menu. In addition, the front-end developer is responsible for making sure the website works properly on all devices.
• Back-end developer – Back-end developers are responsible building the elements of the website that exist “behind the scenes.” In other words, they work on the part of the website that isn’t visible to end users. They use advanced programming languages to create the code for the servers and databases that store and arrange your website data. They’re also responsible for website testing and fixing any bugs that are identified during testing.
• Full stack developers – In some instances, you’ll have a website developer who can perform all the front-end and back-end coding. These individuals are called full stack developers.

Designers and Developers Both Help Create an Engaging User Experience

Website designers and developers work together in a complementary manner to build your website, and both are critical to the success of the project. While they perform distinct roles, they both play an important role in creating an engaging user experience that sets your website up for success.

Delivering a great user experience is one of the most important goals of the process, as this will ensure your audience has a positive reaction whenever they visit your website and are more likely to return. If your website provides a poor user experience, you’re much more likely to see visitors leave quickly and seek solutions for their pain points from one of your competitors who provide a better experience.

Both web designers and web developers contribute to your ability to create a great user experience. The designer achieves this goal by making sure your website looks engaging, is easy to navigate, and clearly directs users towards the desired actions they should take. The developer achieves this goal by making sure the website functions properly, loads quickly and looks good on any device used to view it.

What Are the Main Differences Between the Website Designer and Developer Roles?

What’s the Difference Between a Website Designer and a Website Developer?

Due to the complementary nature of these roles, there is some crossover between their skill sets. However, these are two distinct roles and while your website designer and developer work together to build a high performing website, there are many elements of their jobs that are wholly different from one another.

Website Designers Do Not Write the Code

While some designers may have a working knowledge of coding best practices, they aren’t responsible for writing the code or programming your website. Coding isn’t involved in any of the primary tasks associated with enhancing the visual experience of the website, such as developing visual assets, designing CTA buttons, creating mockups and designing layouts.

Website Developers Do Not Create Assets

Website developers, on the other hand, do not play a role in creating the visual assets that contribute to the aesthetic appeal of the website. Instead, the developer writes the code to ensure these visual elements function properly when they appear on the website.

Webolutions Can Help You Build a Website That Grows Your Business

Due to the highly specialized nature of these two roles, it’s important to work with a website company that provides both website design and development services. When you work with an agency that has both in-house designers and developers, it will allow for greater collaboration and alignment between these two important components of the process.

At Webolutions, we have the specialists needed to build a website that performs well, engages your audience, generates leads and grows your business. We’ve been building websites since 1994, when the internet was in its infancy. We’ve witnessed firsthand how website best practices have evolved over the past three decades, and our team possesses the expertise necessary to build a website that sets all your marketing efforts up for success.

You’ll benefit from our unique Websites Right Methodology™ which provides a fully integrated, strategic approach to website development. This exclusive approach has been refined over nearly 30 years and incorporates the knowledge and lessons learned from designing thousands of websites. Our Websites Right Methodology™ utilizes a meticulous process that creates a far better client experience and results in superior website marketing performance that elevates your business results.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves businesses nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post What’s the Difference Between a Website Designer and a Website Developer? appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

In order to make the best decision regarding your new website, it’s important to first understand the difference between custom web design and template websites. By understanding what is capable with each option, you can determine which solution is right for you.

What Is a Custom Website?

As the name implies, a custom website is tailored to address the unique needs and goals of your business. Your website will be built completely from scratch in order to ensure it meets your specifications and possesses the functionality necessary for your business to grow and thrive. Because it is completely customized, your website will have a unique look and feel that stands apart from all other websites – both in your industry and other industries.

While custom web design provides a truly unique look and feel, it accomplishes much more than this. It also involves creating specific back-end coding that will deliver the advanced functionality, navigation architecture, features and integrations necessary to achieve your goals. Due to the intensive planning, extensive design and development work, and increased complexities associated with these websites, it’s crucial to work with an experienced custom web design company if you choose this option.

What Is a Template Website?

Template websites use a pre-designed layout that dictates how the website will be constructed. These templates make designing a website much faster, easier and cheaper, but they also create significant limitations regarding your website’s look and feel, advanced functionality, and the ability to truly cater your website to the specific needs of your business.

For businesses trying to build their website on their own, template website options provide the DIY capabilities you need. However, you will also lose out on the support and technical expertise provided by an experienced custom web design agency. These limitations in support and customization make it much more challenging to maximize your website’s ability to function optimally as a marketing tool.

Learn more about Webolutions Website Design and Development Services

Which Option Is Right for Me?

Due to the significant limitations associated with template websites, they typically underperform compared with custom websites. If your business is looking to achieve the best ROI on your website marketing efforts, you are almost always better off going with a custom website. However, there may be certain instances when a template website may be the right solution for your needs. When deciding between the two, make sure to evaluate how important each of the following criteria are to your business:

• Conveying your brand
• Functionality
• Scalability
• SEO results
• Time to build
• Cost

Conveying Your Brand

Your brand is essential to the identity of your business. It provides a memory bank of positive associations between your company and the moments of happiness it creates in people’s lives based on what it stands for. A strong brand makes it easier for your audience to identify with your business and understand what they can expect when they purchase your products and services. Effective branding creates an emotional connection that strengthens your ability to obtain new customers and retain existing ones.

Your website is one of the most important tools at your disposal to convey your brand messaging to your audience. Since growing your brand is crucial to the success of your business, a website that more effectively conveys your branding will perform much better than one that limits your ability to grow your brand.

Template websites are extremely limited in their ability to convey your branding and differentiate your business from your competitors. You are constrained in your ability to change color schemes, typography, layout, and many other items which are critical to conveying your brand. Instead, you will have a generic looking website that will make it more challenging to stand out from your competitors.

Custom websites, on the other hand, give you a blank slate. You can choose a color scheme that incorporates your brand colors, typography that matches your branding, and custom imagery that promotes your brand story. You can create a unique layout for your website that is appealing to your target audience and feels completely different from other websites. This will not only more effectively convey your brand, but it will also help you stand out from your competitors.

Advantage: Custom websites

Functionality

Just as website templates limit your ability to achieve a unique look and feel which conveys your brand, they also possess significant limitations in the functionality they offer. If you only need a very simple website, this may not be a problem. However, most businesses typically need a website that possesses greater functionality than can be achieved with a template.

There are a variety of ways in which a template website may potentially restrict the specific functionality requirements your business may have:

• Mobile-friendly design – The vast majority of people view websites on their phones, and a mobile-friendly website has become essential both for user experience and improved SEO Unfortunately, many website templates do not offer responsive design capabilities, limiting your ability to provide a good user experience on mobile devices.
• Ecommerce – Custom websites are essential for businesses looking for ecommerce capabilities. While many website template platforms offer effective ecommerce solutions, they are often very confusing and challenging to get to work properly. For example, most template ecommerce websites do a very poor job reconciling taxes associated with sales generated on your website. For seamless ecommerce website functionality that provides your team with an excellent user experience, custom websites provide far superior results.
• Security – Website hackers are more sophisticated than ever, making website security an essential for all businesses. Template websites are much more susceptible to hackers because a breach to the template provider’s system puts every website using their templates at risk. Custom websites provide significantly more advanced security, making it much harder for cyber attacks to bring down your website.
• User experience – Your website’s user experience must be created strategically in order to not only ensure that it’s easy for your audience to find what they need, but that they are also guided towards interacting with the specific conversion elements you’ve added to drive business. Custom websites allow you to set up a user experience focused on the specific needs of both your business and your audience. Template websites lack the customization necessary to deliver a user experience that will drive conversions.

Advantage: Custom websites

Scalability

If you think back to the early days of your business, it most likely looked a lot different than it does now. Growth creates change. As your business continues to grow and evolve over the next few years, it may look completely different than it does now:

• You may offer new products and services
• You may be targeting a new audience
• You may have different business goals
• You may have grown substantially in size and scope

It should come as no surprise that in order to meet the evolving needs of your business over time, your website must be easily scalable. Custom websites provide the scalability you need. There are no limitations on what can be created with custom web design, and this allows you to make any additions or alterations to the functionality of your website that you may need as your business grows.

Template websites, on the other hand, lack the flexibility necessary to make your website scalable over time. You are largely limited by the features provided by the template you choose. While these features may meet your needs now, they may no longer meet your needs in several years. If this occurs, you won’t have the ability to add the new functionality required by the growth of your business.

Advantage: Custom websites

SEO Results

In recent years, it has become increasingly challenging to rank well on search engines. As a result, it’s crucial that your website be constructed using SEO best practices. Custom websites provide much greater ability to achieve the SEO results you need. These websites are built using the latest coding best practices, providing cleaner back-end programming. This will significantly reduce page load times and site speed compared to template websites, which often contain older, bloated coding practices that slow down the website’s performance.

Faster site speed is one of the primary criteria driving Google’s search algorithms and as a result, custom websites will help your SEO performance. In addition, the ability to implement a mobile-friendly responsive design on a custom website will further improve your search rankings compared with template websites.

Custom websites also provide the ability to tailor your navigation architecture to the unique needs of your audience, making it easier for them to find the information they need. This improves user experience, which will boost your SEO rankings.

Advantage: Custom websites

Time to Build

It should come as no surprise that the increased complexity and customization associated with custom websites will require more time to build. Custom web design requires a longer planning phase to ensure your website is built in a way that addresses the specific needs and goals of your business. This planning phase will involve extensive collaboration between your team and your custom web design company, and it includes:

• A detailed discussion of your business goals, marketing goals, and goals for the website development project
• Establishing the relevant KPIs necessary to measure the success of your website over time
• The development of a wireframe (a blueprint of the website architecture) and detailed website mockups (static images displaying the design of the different pages on your website) to ensure alignment between your team and your web design agency.

In addition, the steps involved in building the website – front-end design, back-end development, copywriting, testing, on-page SEO – all take a significant amount of time to complete. If you require specific advanced functionality that creates additional layers of complexity to your website, it will extend the timeline for the buildout process even longer. The good news is that many of these steps can be performed concurrently, which will speed up the process significantly.

Template websites take a lot of this work out of the process. Using a pre-built template significantly reduces the development time. In addition, you’re limited by the color schemes, layouts and other design elements associated with the template, so this eliminates the need for wireframes, mockups and many of the other planning items that go into a custom website. You can simply create new pages and add the content and images you need for each page. As a result, template websites can be built much faster than a custom website.

Keep in mind that faster doesn’t mean better. The additional time for planning, building and testing also helps you achieve better website performance and superior marketing results. If your goal is to maximize the performance of your website (and it should be), then the longer development time for a custom website will pay dividends for years to come. But if you’re in a time crunch and really need to launch a website as fast as possible, a template website will help you complete the project in the least amount of time.

Advantage: Template websites

Cost

Custom websites aren’t cheap. They are very labor intensive and time-consuming to build. The additional custom functionality adds to the complexity of the project as well. For this reason, you’ll need the assistance of a custom web design company that assigns a team of specialists to build the high performing website your business needs. But with additional cost comes improved performance and superior marketing results. Ultimately, this will benefit your business immensely and deliver much better ROI for the life of your website.

Unfortunately, not every company has the financial resources to afford a custom website. If your budget is limited, it may not be practical to enlist the services of a custom web design and development agency. In these situations, a template website may help you stay within your budget. Just keep in mind that the tradeoffs associated with this lower cost – pre-packaged design layouts, limited functionality, poorer SEO performance, etc.

If you can afford the cost of a custom website, this is always the best solution. The benefits you’ll achieve make the additional cost well worth it in the long run. But if you simply can’t afford a custom website, a template solution will allow you to build a web presence while your company continues to grow. As your company experiences greater success and your marketing budget grows, you can then replace your template website with a custom website.

Advantage: Template websites

Webolutions Offers Custom Web Design Services that Help Your Business Thrive

If your primary goal for building a new website is to maximize the ROI on your marketing efforts, there is no substitute for custom web design. A template website is simply unable to match the levels of performance you’ll experience from a custom website. At Webolutions, we can create a custom website that will address your specific goals in order to help your business grow and thrive.

Our unique Websites Right Methodology™ has been developed over nearly three decades, and it leverages the knowledge and experience we’ve gained from building thousands of websites since our inception in 1994. This process provides a fully integrated, strategic approach to custom web design and development which delivers increased marketing performance that will help your business become more successful.

With our exclusive Websites Right Methodology™, you’ll benefit from a truly collaborative process that engages your team at every stage to ensure we are all aligned on achieving your specific goals. This starts with an extensive planning phase which includes:

• Thorough discovery sessions where we develop your website goals, allowing us to design with these goals in mind and measure success over time
• Outlining the home page key elements to define your story, convey your brand messaging, and help your audience more easily navigate to the areas of the website which will provide them with the information they need
• Creating detailed website mockups to ensure you love your design before we begin building your website
• Outlining of all functional requirements to ensure your website provides the optimal user experience your audience desires and drives the conversions you expect

During the website design and development process, our team will perform all custom programming and development required to achieve the advanced functionality you need. When necessary, we will incorporate third-party tools to enhance this functionality. We’ll also work with your team to develop and implement a tactical content strategy that establishes your business as a thought leader, builds trust with your audience and effectively communicates your story. Our proven SEO best practices will be used to provide the best possible search engine rankings.

Prior to launch, we will conduct comprehensive website testing for different browsers and devices to ensure your website works properly and is delivering the desired experience. After launch, we will conduct ongoing analysis to monitor your website’s success, and we’ll provide recommendations as needed for improvements that will drive better results.

Contact us today to schedule a free website development consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post Custom Web Design vs. Template Websites: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Website development refers to all of the steps that go into the creation of a new website. This includes a wide range of actions, updates and operations that allow you to not only build the website, but effectively manage it once it goes live. This is a complicated process that typically involves a team of specialists to ensure every phase is performed correctly.

When all of the stages of the website development process are executed properly, you’ll experience a variety of benefits:

• Better search engine rankings
• Ability to convey your brand messaging more effectively
• Improved scalability
• Ability to implement advanced functionality that addresses the needs of your business
• Better overall user experience
• Increased website traffic
• Improved lead generation and conversions

To experience these benefits, you’ll need to devote a significant amount of time and resources to the website development process. The following stages are crucial to building an effective website that will help your business grow and thrive:

• Information Gathering
• Planning
• Design
• Content Creation
• Development
• Testing
• Launch
• Maintenance

Information Gathering

This is one of the most critical, yet often overlooked steps of the website development process. In order to ensure your new website addresses the specific needs of your business, it’s crucial to engage in an information gathering process that explores the purposes and goals of your new website. The insights gained from this information gathering will set the proper course for the rest of the project, ensure your resources are being used efficiently, and help avoid unexpected issues later in the process.

The first part of the information gathering process should focus on identifying the purpose and goals for your new website. Some potential goals may include:

• Growing your brand
• Providing educational materials to your audience
• Improving search engine rankings
• Increasing lead generation and conversions
• Increasing online product sales
• Boosting customer loyalty and garnering repeat sales
• Establishing your business as an industry thought leader

While it’s good to establish a few goals, we recommend that you focus on the 3-4 items most critical to driving your business forward. If you have too many goals, it will be more challenging to create a cohesive plan that effectively addresses them all.

Once you’ve established your goals, you’ll need to compile information about your target audience. This should include:

• Demographic info (age, education level, income, etc.)
• Interests and habits
• Pain points, concerns and needs
• Types of messaging which may motivate them to take action

The best way to gather this information is to build detailed personas for each group in your target audience. These personas will ensure that the design elements, content and calls to action used on your website resonate with the specific needs of your audience.

Learn more about Webolutions Website Design and Development Services

Planning

The information gathered during the first phase of the process will be used to create a detailed plan for the website development project. The plan should include the following items:

• Sitemap – This will define your website navigation. It includes a list of all pages that will be included on the website and how they relate to one another. The sitemap will group pages into primary topics and related subtopics in a way that creates a user-friendly navigation structure.
• Wireframe – This is a visual blueprint of the website. It provides a description of the website’s layout and functionality before any design elements such as colors, logos fonts, branding elements, or other visual assets are added.
• Functionality requirements – What functional elements must be added to the website to achieve the goals established in the first phase of the process? Depending on your goals and the specific needs of your audience, this can involve eCommerce functionality, user logins, social media integrations, dealer handoffs, and many other items.
• CMS requirements – List out the features you’ll need from a content management system (CMS) to ensure your new website provides an intuitive and streamlined admin experience.
• SEO opportunities – Identify the keywords used by your target audience when they are researching the products, services and solutions you provide. These keywords will directly impact your choice of pages to include in your sitemap.
• KPIs – What are the metrics you’ll use to evaluate the success of your new website? These success metrics should relate to the goals established in phase one and provide you with the insights necessary to understand what adjustments must be made over time to improve your results.

Design

During the design phase, all visual elements are added to your wireframe to bring your website to life. These elements include:

• Images
• Photos
• Videos
• Colors
• Typography
• Logos
• CTAs

Your design should be created with your target audience in mind and should help convey your brand messaging. The design phase is critical to your ability to achieve a unique website that helps your business stand out from your competitors.

At the end of the design process, you’ll be able to view a static mockup of your new website design. This will give your team a clear understanding of what the final website will look like and provide you with an opportunity to request any revisions necessary to convey your brand messaging more effectively.

Content Creation

During the next stage of the website development process, you’ll begin writing the content for every page on your site. Well written, informative and engaging content is critical to the success of your website. Your content is one of the primary ways to convey your brand messaging, establish your business as an industry thought leader and build trust with your audience. In addition, your content plays an integral role in your ability to rank well on the search engines.

Your website should contain a mix of the following types of content:

• SEO content – Pages and blogs written to address the keywords identified during the planning stage of the website development process. This content should be highly comprehensive to improve your ability to rank for these keywords. As with all content on your website, it should always remain on brand.
• Long form gated content – If you plan on running email marketing campaigns, you’ll need a mechanism to capture the email contacts for potential leads. One of the most effective ways to do this is to create long form, gated content pieces such as eBooks, white papers and guides. When you make this content gated, your audience will be required to provide their contact information in order to download the material. You can then add their email address to your list of contacts and include them in your email marketing efforts moving forward.
• Educational thought leadership content – Your website is one of the most important opportunities you have to establish your business as an industry thought leader. To accomplish this, you’ll need to write educational content that provides your audience with the important information they need when researching solutions associated with your specific industry.
• Branding content – While every page and blog on your website should convey your brand, there are certain pages on the website that will be specifically devoted to telling your brand story. These include your about us page and any pages devoted to USP (unique selling proposition) items you offer.

Development

The writing and development stages should actually be considered steps 4A and 4B since they are typically completed at the same time. During the development stage, your website is actually built.

There are two components to the website development phase:

• Front-end development – The designs created earlier in the process are turned into a live, interactive experience that will be seen when individuals visit your website. Tools such as JavaScript, CSS and HTML are used to create the front-end experience seen by your website visitors.
• Back-end development – Back-end programming is responsible for managing the data and functionality that enables the front-end experience seen by your website visitors. Back-end development isn’t seen by the end user, but it is critical for your website to function properly.

Testing

Once development has been completed and all content has been populated on the web pages, your website must go through a series of tests before it can go live. These tests are performed to ensure everything is working properly prior to launch.

The testing process will include:

• Checking every link to make sure none are broken
• Checking every form and script to ensure they are working properly
• Using code validators to ensure all code adheres to industry standards
• Evaluating website speed and page load times
• Making sure the website works properly on all browsers and with all devices (desktop, mobile and tablet)

Launch

After all testing is complete and you have confirmed everything is working properly, it’s time to launch the website. This process involves uploading the website to a server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software. After all files have been added to the server, you should run one final test to ensure everything has been uploaded properly.

During the launch process, your web design and development company should provide you with CMS training. This is a basic walkthrough of your website’s admin dashboard so that your team understands how to make edits and updates once the site goes live. While your website design and development agency can make these updates for you, it’s beneficial for your team to understand how to make small updates which don’t require the assistance of a dedicated specialist.

Maintenance

Your website isn’t a static entity. It must be updated and maintained periodically to ensure it continues to meet the needs of your business as it evolves. These maintenance and update tasks can be as simple as adding new content and visual assets to the website. However, it can also include more complex tasks such as:

• Adding new features that provide a better user experience
• Updating website security
• Improving site speed
• Adding integrations with other software
• Fixing bugs
• Updating your CMS as new versions are released

Webolutions Can Help with Your Next Website Development Project

The website development process is highly complex. To ensure every stage is performed correctly, it’s important to work with an experienced web design agency who has in-house specialists responsible for each of the tasks discussed above. Webolutions can deliver a high quality website that will set your business up for success.

Since its inception in 1994, Webolutions has been regarded as one of the nation’s leading website design and development agencies. Our exclusive Websites Right Methodology™ has been developed from the knowledge and lessons learned from building thousands of websites over the past 27 years. This unique, fully integrated, strategic approach to website development creates a superior client experience and increased website marketing performance that will elevate the success of your business.

All of the stages of the development process discussed above are performed with meticulous detail, keeping the needs of your business and your target audience front and center at all times. Our team will collaborate with you every step of the way to ensure we are all aligned and all of your needs are being addressed. Our team of experienced developers can implement any advanced website functionality you may need, and our designers will create a custom web design that brings your brand story to life.

You’ll also benefit from:

• Tactical content leadership that creates an ongoing plan for the content you need to achieve your goals over time
• SEO best practices that will achieve better search engine rankings
• Ongoing analysis to ensure you’re achieving the KPIs established during the planning phase of the website development project
• Strategic recommendations from our marketing experts to improve your website’s performance over time

Contact us today to schedule a free website development consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post What Are the Stages of the Website Development Process? appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Choosing and Pairing Typefaces

In 2008, web designers had 18 fonts to use. Nowadays, with the explosion of web font services like TypeKit, Google Web Fonts, and @font-face, designers have the ability to implement thousands of typefaces into their designs. The most integral consideration when working with typography is the style and family of font to be used. There are two basic styles: serif and sans-serif. Serif fonts have serifs or extra embellishments at the end of stokes (think of Times New Roman); some call them feet or tails, whereas sans serif fonts are without serifs (think of Arial); no extra details are found on the end of each letter.

When choosing fonts for your website, focus on a primary font, used for headings and sub-headings, and a body font, used for the majority of the written copy throughout the website. Avoid using more than two or three fonts. Having more can potentially muddle a design. It’s often best to combine a serif with a sans serif. When you’re pairing multiple fonts to work together it’s crucial that you maintain both unity and variety. Fonts, like people, have personalities. And Fonts’ personalities, just like those of people, can sometimes clash. There are dozens of things to consider. For the simplicity of this article, I’ll illustrate the most important: a comparable x-height. The x-height of a typeface describes the height from the baseline (the line upon which most letters “sit”) to the upper reaches of the lower case characters. For a successful pairing, try to keep the x-height of the two proportionally similar.

Leading (or line-height)

Leading is the distance, or white space, between lines of writing and plays a large role in legibility. Appropriate leading makes it easier for a reader to habitually follow the text from one line to the next. Poor leading creates discord and tension, often resulting in the reader losing their place while reading. Leading also alters the perception of white space on a website. Too little leading, and the copy looks too dense. Too much and the copy looks fragmented. Choosing your leading depends on several factors, including the font used, the size, and the style. The larger the type size, the less leading is required. Typically, the leading should be 3-6pt larger than the type size. So, if you’re font size is 14px, a 17px-20px leading should work. Taking the time to ensure you’re using appropriate leading can have a huge positive impact on the usability of your website.

Go Big, REALLY BIG

When it comes to choosing web fonts, bigger is better. Always err on the side of making things bigger, and allow yourself to scale down if necessary. Most websites are crammed with tiny text that’s a strain to read, despite all browsers defaulting to a font size of 16px. Why? It’s just a collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really small. 16px is the text sizes browses were intended to display. Additionally, 16px text on a screen is about the same size as text printed in a book or magazine (accounting for the average reading distance of 20-23 inches from the computer screen). The more difficult your text is to read, the less of it a user will read–and the less of what a user reads, the less of your company message will be understood. 10px is illegible, 12px is still much too small, and even 14px can be a strain for many users.

Jeffrey Zeldman, web design rockstar and proclaimed “King of Web Standards” by Business Week, recently redesigned his website with the concept of huge typography in mind. Using 24px as the default size for the body copy, Zeldman explains “this version is designed for now. I love mobile for reading and I wanted to honor the concept of ‘mobile-first’ by pushing it possibly farther than a sane designer would.” While this is a stretch for many, Zeldman is certainly pushing the needle in the direction of large typography. Anything less than 16px with today’s modern monitors is a costly usability mistake.

I’ll be following this article with a Part two in the months to come, including more useful web typography tips.

The post 3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Web Typography: Part 1 appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.