Designing a website can be tough, as there are so many and everyone wants theirs to stand out the most. In order to keep up with the competition, attract people to your site and have them keep returning, there are a few things that should be considered to not only make it look more appealing, but also easy and simple to navigate through. Here are 5 “friendly” things to consider when designing a website.
1. Mobile-Friendly
As technology improves and our lives become more dependent and focused around it, people have get a better knack for the quick and easy. They like the convenience of being able to pay a bill or send an email or look up directions by simply pulling out their smart phone and doing so on the spot. That is the reason why the first priority is to get the website built in “responsive” design which allows it to be opened properly in all devices such as on smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, laptops and browsers like firefox, chrome, safari, internet explorer etc. It is definitely a great way to not only allow your website the opportunity to be viewed anywhere anytime, but it affords the customer convenience and quick access to whatever they are looking for through any device and/or browser.
2. Search Engine-Friendly
Easy is everyone’s ideal. That’s why ensuring that you make your website search engine-friendly with proper and updated coding & scripts, so that search engines can crawl, cache & index your website properly in their database. One important thing to keep in mind is to ensure you are using proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3) on the website so that when someone is searching for your website on Google then they can easily find it.
3. User-Friendly
We want to make sure that it’s easy for anyone who opens up your site to navigate around fluidly and find what they are looking for. Whether it’s information or a specific item, you want people to keep coming back. So the more user-friendly it is, the better. Presentation plays a major part too, so it’s a good idea to avoid flashing banners, overcrowded pages, too much noise, and too much information as a lot of people are instantly turned away by it. Keeping those things in mind, it’s important to make your website appealing, well organized and to the point and of course, easy to get around.
4. Client-Friendly
A major factor that glues all of the fine details together is to have a simple, easy-to-modify back-end which clients can alter without much training. A back-end is basically all of the information relating to what the user has input in the front end (the website itself), and is stored on a server and acts similarly to a database. There are CMS (content management system) like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal which are freely available and provides almost all back-end features to the client in easy to understand manner. There are many benefits of having a website built in WordPress CMS. It is the most widely used CMS, powering more than 23 percent of all websites on the net. There are many free-&-paid plugins-&-themes which can fulfill most of your requirements.
5. Hackers & Spammers Non-Friendly
After spending countless hours designing and setting up your site, the last thing you want is for to be overrun with spam and even worse, hacked. A few things that you can do to help prevent this from occurring may seem like common sense, but are really important. You want to make sure that you are scanning and keeping track of changes made to or added to your coding that you didn’t do yourself. You also want to make sure that the private information of your clients remains just that, private. You can install SSL certificate on your IP/server to prevent leak of any such private information. Finally, do your research and check for IPs that has been blacklisted so that you can prevent them from accessing your site.