In web design, user experience (UX) is everything. If people aren’t enjoying their time on your site — discovering, learning, laughing, or buying — they’ll simply leave, and they may never come back again. The best websites keep visitors engaged and encourage repeat visits; for brands seeking audience engagement, sales conversions, and a steady stream of new leads, a great website is essential. While there’s no one single formula for creating a great website, we hope these five tips from the TrendyMinds web team will put you on the right track. Content is crucial Great web design starts with great content. Without it, there’s nothing to design around. The first step toward creating great content is establishing the purpose of your website and what you want to share with your audience, followed by mapping out where that content will live across your site. It’s important to recognize web content isn’t just about words and images: it’s also about content design and UX design, which refers to the flow of your site and the ways users see and interact with content as they scroll. Most of the best websites are simple, easy to navigate, and give visitors the information they need quickly. If all you want is to share information, make sure your content is front and center and displayed in a compelling way. If you want users to take a journey across your site and ultimately do something — sign up to a contact list or download an asset, for example — plan out the steps it will take for users to get there. Understanding how your audience will engage with your content is essential for designing your site to meet their needs. Prioritize SEO To ensure that your site is easy for people to find, you need to optimize your content for search engines. This practice is called search engine optimization (SEO), and it’s accomplished by strategically peppering important keywords throughout your content. You can find the best SEO keywords through programs like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush. However, it’s important to remember that you can’t just drop keywords into your text at random. Search engines like Google are smarter than ever, and they know how to filter out sites that spam SEO keywords. That’s why it’s crucial for content writers to take an intelligent approach to SEO, inserting keywords where they make the most sense contextually for the user. And for web developers, it means making sure page elements are tagged correctly so it is simple for search engines to understand what a page's content is about. For a more robust SEO strategy, create content pillars and clusters on topics, with pages that link to each other. This can improve engagement on your site and give you lots of opportunities to include strategic keywords across an entire content ecosystem. Always be accessible Great websites have accessible, inclusive design. This means making your site as easy to use as possible for everyone, including people with vision, hearing, and movement disabilities. Accessibility is important because it makes for the best possible experience for all users, and it can help you avoid future complaints, and potential legal issues, about your site or organization. As a baseline for accessible design, be sure to make your site compatible with screen readers, and use colors and typography that are easy for everyone to distinguish. You should also use alt-text to be as descriptive about images as possible — don't just leave your alt-text as something like “screenshot-4-29-22.” It’s important to give interactive elements like input fields and buttons dedicated focus states, to make them accessible for people with limited movement who navigate sites by tabbing their keyboard instead of using a mouse or trackpad. Beyond these basics, it’s essential to take a design approach to ensuring accessibility on your site. Think about the journey that every different type of user might make across your site, and what arrangements of fonts and graphics would make their user experience as streamlined, pleasant, and productive as possible. Make the most of mobile Mobile devices are what people use to access the internet more than half of the time. This is why it’s essential to approach web design with a mobile mindset first, and then scale up to desktop-sized design. Simplicity is nice to have on desktop sites — but on mobile, it’s a must-have. When people interact with their mobile devices, they’re interacting with a smaller screen size, and they’re often searching for quick information on the go. Keep the menus of your mobile site short and sweet, and break content down into easily digestible blocks. Don’t get swept up in including flashy animations or interactive elements that don't add value; they often interfere with the user experience on mobile by getting in the way or slowing down page load speeds. Balance fun with speed Page load speed is important to consider when designing for desktop as well as mobile. Keeping web performance top-of-mind can help you decrease frustration for users and create more seamless browsing experiences. This might mean thinking of new or different ways to incorporate creative assets like videos and animations. These can add a sense of fun to your page, but they also slow down loading speed. You can certainly still use them, but it’s best to keep file sizes small and functions relatively limited to ensure quick load times. Web of opportunities The truth is, there are many wrong ways to build a website — but there are limitless opportunities to do it the right way if you have the right skills and expertise on your side. For a partner in building the best site for your brand and your audience, contact the TrendyMinds team.