July 9, 2024
By hiring a designer! 😁 Truth aside, if you still want to DIY your website at least try to follow this checklist here…
Ask your clients and customers what they want. This is your user research right there. List the answers to the most frequently asked questions you get about your business and those you have when you land on a website. Who is selling and what? Who is the service or product for? Why do they need it? How can they get it?
Since you are DIY-ing your website I presume you haven’t invested (yet) in proper branding. But even if you haven’t, this doesn’t mean it has to be complicated or include a presentation deck with your branding elements, mood boards and other deliverables that a brand designer might secure for you. If you feel lost on this topic, here is your guide. For free.
Keep it simple! In your navigation, you should give access to your visitors to the sections or pages where they would most likely look for questions. What are the working hours of this business? Can I get a quote for their service? Do they also offer service XYZ? Are they a cat person or a dog person? Whatever is important for your audience based on their personas (if you have those), make sure to make it easy to find within < 1 sec.
This is the part of web design that takes time and adjustment. Also, it is an ongoing process that has to be monitored after any update of your content. But after you upload all your content following all the website builder’s suggestions for better performance, it's time to test! This website is the one I use to update the overall performance of my website and those of my client.
For some people it's easy to paint a picture for others it is extremely hard to put all the pieces together in a way they all fit well. Since you have chosen the hard way of doing it yourself, it won’t be a bad idea to look up some design theory so you can not only appreciate designers' work more but also make a bit more knowledge-based decisions for your designs. 😁
Here is a read for you.
Mobile-friendly, responsive, and optimized for mobile — all the same and very important part of the user experience of your online presence. If you can start the design process with a mobile-first approach, that is great, but if you can’t, do not neglect it either. In this article I am focusing on websites, regardless of your website builder (Webflow, Wix Studio, Framer, Shopify, Squarespace or others), make sure you check the responsiveness not only in the editor but also on actual devices in your immediate circles.
Last but not least, update, monitor and apply feedback regularly. To keep people coming and checking out your website also make sure that each page is behaving as it's supposed to. Here is a beginner course on how to use Google Analytics for this purpose.
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