There are lots of great graphic designers who have a fantastic eye and skill but little formal training in digital marketing. If you’re one of those people, and you want to design effective websites, you might find the below tips useful.
Top 10 tips for digitally challenged designers in Ireland
1. Use the metrics
There are numerous analytical packages out there that can help you to determine which pages on a website are performing and which are leaking users - it’s particularly important to study the performance of pages along the conversion path or on squeeze pages. Google analytics is one of the best of these packages and it's completely free.
2. Build for as many browsers as possible:
Try to create web pages that are compatible with as many browsers and browser updates as possible. There are a few main ones that you should definitively focus on: Safari,
Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox.
3. Test
Its one thing to build for browser compatibility, it’s another to achieve that compatibility. Test your website in as many different browsers as possible - I like to use browsershots.org , a free tool that will give you a good indication of any issues and can help to lead further investigation. Again, remember that you can only focus on the main ones.
4. Clear calls-to-action
As a web designer in Ireland, I find it truly amazing to see how many websites do not have clear calls to action. Sometimes I arrive on websites and genuinely, I am confused as to what the company wants me to do.
Set clear goals that you wish users to perform on the website and give them clear calls to action. The secret to a great website is to ensure that the user never has to think unnecessarily.
5. Take advantage of white space.
Graphic designers know that white space is not wasted space, despite what some clients think. Finding a clear and concise way to explain this to clients will save you a lot of time, effort and pain! Here’s a line that I tend to use again and again: white space makes the website more visually appealing to users and ensures that they are not overwhelmed by too much information presented at once.
6. Semantic code
Ensure everything is tagged with your source code - Titles, heading tags, etc. This will help to encourage search engines to crawl the site and ultimately increase the sites visibility on search engines - which is good for their business and will probably be great for yours (because they’ll never want to work with any another web designers in Ireland).
7. Attribute tags
Make sure that you include image attributes to help search engines to index your images. Indexing your pics can achieve big wins with little effort.
8. Keep an eye out for errors
We call it sanity testing but its inevitable that you will overlook some errors when you have been working on a project for a long time - it’s natural so don’t beat yourself up over small errors. Instead, expect that mistakes exist and ask one of your colleagues to look over everything (including copy) with a fresh pair of eyes.
9. Legal
Before you get started consider legal issues, including copyright and copy scrapping. This is a big issue and failure to take proper note will definitively hurt your SEO efforts. A free plagiarism or copy check can be done at copyscape.com. This will indicate whether any of your text has been copied from other sources.
10. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater
It is not difficult to design a basic web site but designing a site the delivers high quality traffic on an ongoing basis is more complicated. Now, businesses are looking for more than a pretty site and they expect more and more from web designers in Ireland. Today, they demand that their site puts in the hard graft for them.
This is not to say that the days of the beautiful brochure site are dead and gone, far from it, but why should a site be merely beautiful when it can be gorgeous AND a business’s best sales person.
