You want your website to stand out in the contemporary environment, where websites have become an integral aspect of any business. Every website is unique in its own way, but what remains constant is how to properly design, develop, and launch it. A user’s perception of a website is strongly influenced by its design.
A recent survey found that the average failure rate for online businesses and eCommerce is over 80%. Some typical causes include the lack of a comprehensive strategy or plan for an online business, the failure to wow clients, or the inability to differentiate themselves from rivals.
Building a website with the most recent web design trends that can give it a distinct personality is necessary if you want it to stand out. Let’s look at the website design checklist for creating such a website to ensure you don’t overlook any important components.
Why is it vital to use a website design checklist?
A checklist for website design can assist the designer in taking care of all important chores and concerns. A website design checklist helps designers and developers keep their responsibilities structured and clear while working on various aspects that are in the flow during website design and development.
Production of websites will become simple, evenly divided, and manageable.
A website design checklist aids the team and employer in ensuring that everyone is on the same page and that nothing gets overlooked.
Before deployment, you may identify potential problems using a website design checklist, and by carefully following the checklist’s instructions, you can reduce mistakes or technical issues.
A website design checklist can help ensure all necessary components work properly, improving the user experience.
After understanding the website design checklist, let’s discover how to construct a precise website design checklist for your successful launch.
Research
It is crucial to thoroughly examine your product, its significance, potential use cases, target audience, and rivals before beginning your project for the website. The purpose of your business will be stronger, and the need for website design will be more transparent if you are aware of the problem statement that your audience is experiencing and how other competitors are tackling it.
- Conduct market and user research
Certain of your website’s characteristics may encourage user interaction, while other elements may perplex them. With integrated data, your team can easily comprehend changes and upgrades that will save time, effort, and money. For your research, you can employ the following strategy.
The most popular technique is a survey, where you use online forms to pose open-ended questions to potential users.
Interview: With this technique, you conduct in-person or online video interviews with potential clients to learn more about their challenges, current methods, and possible solutions.
Competitor research: You can learn a lot from competitors, so it can be helpful to have a comprehensive understanding of who they are, how they operate, and their strengths and weaknesses to comprehend why users favor their website.
- Examination of rivals
The competitive analysis phase of website building is crucial because it enables you to comprehend the online ecology of your market and identify niches for your brand.
For competition analysis, you can use the following guidelines:
Start by compiling a list of your leading rivals’ websites. Please note any functionalities or features that stand out in their websites’ overall look and feel.
Please consider how easily visitors can use the site’s navigational features to find the necessary information.
Analyze the information on the websites, the products and services they provide, and the overall brand tone and method of user communication.
Keep an eye out for their extra features, such as contact forms, chatbots, and other services pertinent to your company.
Examining the search engine optimization of rival websites is also crucial. Analyze the material they produce to rank for the keywords they target.
Your website will become a source of income if you perform research to understand the market for your online business better, narrow down your target market, and differentiate yourself from the competition.
Project Management
To ensure everyone involved is on the same page and that no critical details are overlooked, exceptional preparation work must be done before beginning the website design process. The overall strategy and course of action for your website design project are determined by project planning. The following are the checklists you should go over when preparing a project:
- Project Definition Source
Identifying the website’s objective is the first step. A project brief, also known as a creative and technical brief, enters the picture in this situation. You must have responses to the following questions to create a project brief:
What services does your company offer? What benefit do you offer your clients?
What is the main goal you are pursuing with this website? What issue will this website attempt to address?
What demographics best describe your target market? You should conduct audience analysis using a scientific approach and develop your ideal user or client persona. You must take the following factors into account while creating a user persona.
Demography: If you’re building a website for a B2C audience, you’ll need to collect information on things like age, gender, education, location, employment status, needs, interests, etc. You must determine the ideal customer’s company size, position, and company role before building a B2B website.
Psychographic: Determine your user’s objectives, duties, and motivations.
Web graphics: Which operating system your customer uses, what social networking sites does he frequent, where he uses the Internet most frequently, and what other preferences?
What specifications about the sector are you designing the website for? What are the most recent developments in the sector?
Who are your rivals in the market? What distinguishes your business from those of your rivals?
It is crucial to repeat and echo the stakeholders’ concerns until everyone agrees and is on the same page.
- Estimating Project Effort and Cost
Project effort and estimation come next. An essential step in project estimation is establishing a realistic schedule and milestones. It is advised to have a designer, developer, copywriter, and SEO strategist on board during this period, in addition to all the stakeholders.
The moment has come to concentrate on the items listed below.
Get the overall amount of work put into developing the project, including the work of the designer, developer, copywriter, SEO strategist, domain host, etc.
Technical considerations: To choose technical considerations such as a programming language, preferred tech stacks, content management system, etc.
Understanding and choosing a content and SEO strategy, including copywriting efforts, marketing collaterals, marketing tactics, targeting of specific keywords and keyword phrases, etc.
Sitemaps and wireframes: To document sitemaps and wireframes so they can be used as a checklist of website components while being developed. Build the website’s page hierarchy, content silos, and other structures.
A brand style guide, design prototypes, screen flows, design assets, etc., are just a few examples of the design style decisions that must be made.
Assess the visual content’sContent’s value and relevancy, consistency with the brand’s image, etc.
Choosing the right hosting and domain for your website requires careful consideration. Do you have certain hosting needs, such as VPS, cloud hosting, or other environmental conditions?
Online security: To choose the specifics of website security. Questions like whether you need an SSL for your website and whether password protection is necessary, among others, demand answers.
Setting up daily and weekly deadlines is the first step in creating your ultimate website design checklist. You won’t feel overburdened, and you’ll be able to complete your website on schedule, both of which are benefits. All parties involved, including developers, designers, etc., should receive a kickoff email. You can start your project by using the below checklists.
Choose a Domain Name in Step 5
The next step will be selecting a domain name. Take into account these four factors when choosing a domain name or URL for the website:
From a human standpoint, pick a simple domain name to read, say, and remember.
Branding perspective: Choose a unique domain name to stand out and have an extension based on the nature of your business, the nation you are based in, and the industry you are in.
From an SEO standpoint, a domain name’s relevancy to your company cannot be overstated. Try to incorporate one or more company keywords as much as you can.
Legal viewpoint Checking to see if the domain name you have selected is not protected by copyright or trademark is a crucial consideration. Sometimes a name may refer to a website that doesn’t exist, but someone may block the domain.
- Generate Sitemap: Using the sitemap and wireframe document, create a sitemap for the website. Create a variety of website pages and suggested page sections after that. When designing a sitemap for your website, keep the following in mind:
Hierarchy: Ensure that the sitemap of your website is organized and in ascending order. Visitors can easily understand your website when it is managed effectively.
Ensure that your website URLs are easy to understand and track for each page. For ideal SEO techniques, avoid dynamic URLs as much as possible and include significant keywords in URLs.
Ensure that the navigation is straightforward and that your sitemap provides links to all of the important pages on your website. As a result, users will locate what they’re looking for more quickly and easily.
Ensure your sitemap contains the words and phrases you want your website to rank for when people search for them.
Accessibility: You can also determine if people with disabilities can access your sitemap. This entails ensuring images have alternative text, and a keyboard may be used to browse the sitemap.
Design
The next item on our checklist for creating a website is starting the design phase. The website’s design would be based on various features, including the brand components. The ideal course of action for a more efficient development process would be to develop and design collectively after the blueprint is complete.
- Choose a wireframe and design a template
You can research to locate an appropriate design template for your website or create one, depending on the platform selected for hosting the website. The website’s design will be built on the design template. You can choose from pre-existing resources that offer premium templates or have them created internally.
- Choose your fonts and colors
The most important aspects of your website’s elements list are the colors. A good color scheme can enhance brand recognition by 80%. The success of a website is greatly influenced by the color scheme used.
The use of color psychology to choose the best colors for boosting website conversions is given a lot of attention. Use a complementary color scheme to accentuate the beauty of the website once the color has been chosen. The following items are on the color checklist for websites.
Background and text colors
Colors for headings, links, navigation, logo, and banner choose your fonts and colors.
For the entire website, pick no more than 2 or 3 fonts. The critical material should be displayed in a font that is simple to read. Cursive fonts should be avoided. The logo was created using a different font than the content.
Make a Prototype 9.
Your web design checklist should include creating a prototype, followed by all development processes. Modern technologies allow for creation of interactive prototypes that mimic the look and feel of an actual website.
The sitemap-based structure of several pages is displayed in the prototype. It’s crucial to remember that the prototype is iterative and that the number of iterations should be kept to a minimum. Otherwise, it is an endless process.
- Choose your keywords
The SEO team can compile a list of the words and phrases your website will target while developing the prototype. These keywords ought to be ones that your target market may use to look up similar goods and services. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes as a reminder.
It’s a good idea to research rival websites to learn the keywords they are using. Moreover, keyword research will be aided by programs like Moz, Ahrefs, and Semrush. You should utilize this list to generate content for your website.
- Content Management
Currently, content reigns supreme. A potential customer visits the website looking for one and only one answer: “How can you solve their problem?” As a result, you must demonstrate in your content how you can assist them, which is an important component of any website design checklist.
The Homepage, Products/Services page, About Us page, Contact page, Testimonials page, and FAQ page are the pages that are necessary for a website. You might consider including our Blog, News, Prices, Resources, Links, etc., on the other pages, depending on the type of your firm.
- Creating content
Give your content development team a list of focused or SEO keywords to use as a guide while they create material with your target audience in mind. While making the material, the keywords should be used sparingly.
It is best to reserve creativity for non-SEO pages. The website should have a maximum word count for each page. To facilitate voice search, information should be written as naturally as possible.
Prioritize the messages you want to send. The target audience should be inspired to act by the call-to-action (CTA). After the CTA, though, SEO components are advised.
If you have a team of content creators, you can either produce the material yourself or hire a professional to do it for you. To ensure that your website generates a sale with its copy, it is advised to work with either a part-time or full-time copywriter.
Here are some ideas for intriguing website copy.
Speak about the issue: Getting the reader’s interest from the first word piques his interest. Describe the issues and take him on a journey he can relate to.
Their desire to study and learn more increases by generating vivid mental images.
Asking pertinent questions to the audience is one approach to engage them. Your target audience should respond to themselves by nodding, nodding in agreement, or attempting to respond to your question. The copy is engaging when it has a succinct yet complex first sentence.
What’s in it for me? – What’s the catch? Accept the idea that the customer is driven by just one question. It is “What’s in it for me” as well. They are interested in learning how your good or service may assist them in resolving a challenge.
To do this, conducting a thorough market analysis is crucial to understand what inspires and influences your target market to purchase a service or good.
Keep things brief and direct: Refusing flowery language, sales jargon, or cliches is better. Be as specific as you can and steer clear of generalizations. Be clear and concise.
A direct CTA No confusion should exist once a reader enters your website; they should know precisely what you want them to do. CTAs include asking visitors to sign up for the newsletter, register for a webinar, book a webinar, get a quote, etc.
Producing Visual Content
A report reveals that it takes just 100 milliseconds for a user to develop a judgment about your website. I’m done now! There isn’t much chance for you to connect with users. You need to improve the visuals and ensure that it draws ever-increasing numbers of users because, as humans, we want aesthetically appealing stuff it’s simple to recall.
Development
Development is the next crucial step on your website design checklist after the prototype has been approved. Sending the completed website design to developers would be the ideal first step in the development process.
- Changes in Design
When accepted, the completed design is transferred into Photoshop, Illustrator, or another design program. This design offers a simulation of the finished web pages. The developers are then given access to the design after this is complete.
Code 15.
Source code development will be placed throughout the coding phase. It is best to accept the development team’s timeline for a beta version if you want website development to stay on schedule. After that, provide the development team access to development checklists.
Having a set of coding standards is another item on the checklist for website components. Some coding techniques are:
Keep the code organized by deleting strange and unnecessary regulations. An illustration would be using the proper indentations to increase the readability and simplicity of the code.
Provide the necessary comments to make the code comprehensive for web developers of all levels and skill sets.
Choose name conventions that will be used throughout the entire website.
Avoid approaches such as hard-coding values and make the code portable.
Test DevOps at regular intervals.
- Use a navigational plan
Depending on your website’s complexity, there will be several navigational options. You can use the following plans:
Menu for the main navigation
using the site
Using the footer
The breadcrumb trail
Off-canvas usage for mobile devices
Search engine on-site
- Establish a database and hosting account.
Invest in website hosting space. Create new databases and database users if your website uses or requires a CMS.
- Establish an SSL Certificate
Standard Security Technology certification, or SSL certificate, creates secure communications between users and servers. It enables the secure transmission of private data like passwords and credit card numbers. It guards against hackers accessing users’ private information.
Also, because of its reliability, the website gains more credibility. Several web browsers utilize symbols to show that a website is SSL validated, such as a green address bar or a padlock image. Customers are encouraged to provide personal information or make purchases as a result.
Website Excellence
A quality assurance check ensures your website’s end users have a flawless experience. Quality assurance is essential in your website design checklist to find defects quickly and correct them without affecting your customers’ experience. Improve your website’s usability, functionality, and speed; it should be a continual activity.
Testing for Code Quality 19.
Validate HTML and CSS using HTML validators and various browsers as part of the code quality check. Conduct JavaScript quality assurance tests as well.
- Checking for Content Quality
Ensuring the website’s essential content appears on all devices is a crucial component of content testing. When a user clicks to learn more, supporting information should be available. Important content must be displayed in the correct order so the visitor will not miss it.
The website’s content must be checked for errors with a spelling and grammar checker and proofread before it goes live. If you utilize a template, be sure there is no generic text in the online copy.
A content checklist is in place as one of the critical components of the website elements checklist. Take into account the following details for the same:
Arrangement and Typography
Verify your use of apostrophes, commas, and hyphens.
Size of Headings Capitalization
Keyword Volume
Vocabulary and Grammar
The writing style
recurring phrases and word
spelling variations. For instance, compare British and American spellings.
A period or comma should be used after each item in a bulleted list.
- Assessing the quality of Visual Content
Doing a visual content quality check is the next item on the website design checklist.
Verify that every image is optimized and positioned in the appropriate placeholders.
By defining image dimensions for each image, you can ensure the photos are formatted correctly and work with various devices.
Verify that the audio and video files are correctly formatted and compatible with various devices.
Make sure each image has the appropriate Alt tags.
CSS Sprites allow for the combination of all pictures.
Note: It is best for someone not involved in the content generation process to perform the quality check on the written and visual content. Checking layouts, buttons, links, etc., is similar.
- Device and cross-browser compatibility
You must maintain uniformity across all browsers your target audience might use because various browsers render webpages differently. Doing multi-browser tests with website design testing tools to ensure cross-browser compatibility is a crucial step in your website design checklist.
- 23. Page Loading Time
According to one study, if your website takes longer than 4 seconds to load, you risk losing 46% of your clients, and if it takes just one second longer, you risk alienating 16% of your visitors. This information is sufficient to give you a general notion of the importance of page load speed. These are a few key justifications.
A Shopify study found that a one-second increase in page load time on mobile devices can boost conversion by 27%.
The speed at which a website loads affects its ranking in Google search results. Hence, website SEO ranking is strongly impacted by page load speed.
- Alignment of Website Components
Currently, smartphones are used by more than 50% of internet users to visit various websites. You will likely lose some of your most valuable consumers if your website’s elements are not arranged to fit smaller displays. To verify that all the items are proportionally aligned correctly on smaller screen devices, element alignment testing is essential.
- Evaluating the responsiveness of website design
As more people use smartphones than desktops, developing an adaptable design is increasingly essential for any company. For website rankings, Google implemented a policy known as “Mobile-First,” according to which the likelihood of a non-mobile-optimized website ranking highly is relatively low.
The best approach is to have a mobile-first web design, in which the website adjusts to various screen sizes and displays content on any size screen. A mobile-friendly website should not be overly complex and should not require the user to pinch and zoom to view it on a portable device.
Prioritization: Make sure your website is designed so the user can see the most crucial components immediately. While using a mobile device to visit the website, CTA buttons should be visible.
Content is crucial: The website’s content should be accessible and easily readable. The other components typically included on a desktop version shouldn’t occupy any screen real estate.
Simple navigation: A user should be able to move between pages quickly, return to the homepage, and avoid getting lost among the pages. Using widgets that scroll to the top is one method.
Shrink the page size: Cut a few KBs from your web page by resizing images, using alternative image formats like SVG files, compressing data to reduce file size, etc.
Employ Google AMP: Google’s AMP format provides incredibly quick loading by loading only the bare minimum of necessary data and giving readability priority.
To minimize the need for rework in the future, it is ideal to use responsive testing tools throughout the development stage. You can test your website more quickly with the help of 53+ pre-built device viewports and the possibility to build custom screens with mobile-friendly tester tools like LT Browser. Without extensions, you may assess a website’s responsiveness locally and receive its performance score using network simulations, Google Lighthouse, and other tools.
CTA for LT Browser
Contact Information and Forms
The Contact Us form and any other forms for providing data to the website come next. The database accurately stores the information that is entered. Check your mailbox to ensure the email was received if the form was sent to one. Verify the functionality of the page that appears after submitting the form.
Automated responses
Check the website’s autoresponders to see if they are working. Check that the proper auto-responders are sent to the right section of the database if there are several auto-responders. Verify that these messages have also been proofread and are error-free.
- Links
Ensure all the website pages’ external and internal links are placed accurately and functioning as intended. Depending on the selected criterion, the links should either open in the current tab or a new one. Internal links typically open in the same tab, whereas external links open separately. It is advised to link the homepage to the company logo.
- Integrations with third parties
Be sure to properly integrate any third-party technologies you use with your websites, such as CRM, marketing plugins or tools, e-commerce systems, etc.
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization is crucial for the website to rank on search engines. There should only be 70 characters in the page title of each page on the website. Google must approve the website as mobile-friendly.
The metadata for each page should also be distinct and no longer than 156 characters. Keywords should be present in metadata, but they should also be in line with user intent.
Make sure your website’s load speed is optimum. It is recommended to choose www over no-www. To avoid being punished for duplicating material, ensure only one is active. Redirect the option that was not selected to the choice that was.
After Launch
It’s time to bring your concept to life now that all the testing and necessary optimizations have been completed.
Analytical 31
Send Google Search Console a request for the website. After creating a new property, add Google Analytics code to it. To improve your understanding of Analytics, the next step is to connect Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You can set up Google Adwords for your website depending on the nature of your business. Create goals, tracking events, and funnels (sales or marketing) in the analytics program.
You may track website traffic with the aid of visitor tracking software. But be careful to exclude your workplace IP from analytics tracking to identify real organic traffic.
- Monitoring Website Traffic
You can gain knowledge about the origins, sources, and customer behavior, as well as the most effective digital marketing methods, by tracking the traffic to your website to adjust your efforts and strategy in light of the data. Also, monitoring the traffic to rival websites will help you determine which channels bring them more visitors and which keywords they rank for.
To your website, tracking codes can be added. A JavaScript snippet called tracking code enables you to monitor website users’ activities and store them in an analytics module.
Performance 33.
One of the most crucial elements of getting better search engine rankings is testing the performance of your website. Also, while implementing performance as one of the ranking signals, Google Core Web Vitals should not be overlooked.
Performance
A page score of 90 or higher on Google PageSpeed Insights will significantly increase website traffic. JavaScript and CSS files should be combined and minified. It will assist in lowering the volume of HTTP requests.
- Backup
It’s essential to have an automated backup tool! If different stakeholders suggest any adjustments, implement them and grant access to everyone who needs it. Give stakeholders updates and approve the project.
A Conclusion
The secret to success for businesses is creating a distinctive website that could connect with the audience. A website design checklist will cover all the details, and everything will function as it should.
Also, the website’s functionality works just as well as the visual appeal. Make sure any leaks do not compromise the user experience. Despite the fact that customers have access to a variety of browsers, your website’s design may be flawless in just one of them. Testing the browser compatibility of your website is, therefore, essential.
This web design checklist considers everyone involved in the process, resulting in a successful working synergy from the beginning to the launch of the website.