It is essential that we put our best foot forward and develop a website that exudes professionalism and sophistication. After all it’s the face of our business to the outside world. Neither of us has tattoos, although I’m drawn to the idea of having an ocean-themed tattoo, like an octopus on my shoulder. As designers, we tend to scrutinise designs for extended periods, and I’m confident that I’ll identify imperfections or missed chances to improve them even after a month, which can be frustrating. But we needed to balance both the aesthetic appeal and functionality of the site, ensuring that it is easy to navigate and visually captivating, as well as getting our message across. Moreover, we must carefully curate our portfolio, showcasing only the most impressive and relevant works that truly showcase our capabilities.
We began our website design process through extensive competitor research and analysing user experience on desktop and mobile devices. While we came up with impressive motion graphic ideas, we had to ensure they didn’t impact performance speed, as a beautiful website is worthless if it’s slow to load. We learned this the hard way, having to scale back on interactivity to improve load times. To avoid this mistake, use https://tools.pingdom.com/ to check your website’s load speeds.
Oh, and don’t forget about search engines – What the SEO are we talking about? Search Engine Optimisation. Optimising your keywords to boost search engine rankings. Basically means re-writing your content again and again to find the perfect balance of keywords and relevant content to your business. Not forgetting image ‘alt’ text and meta descriptions. You really can edit things until your keyboard starts smoking, so don’t worry about trying to get it perfect, you never will. Our site currently shows as having an AIOSEO ‘excellent’ rating of 85/100, which we’re more than happy with!
Website metrics are also quite addictive, it’s useful to create a Google Analytics account to track the number of visitors to your site daily, you can dive deeper into the data in many areas but be warned, you’ll easily lose an hour or two! Having a Google Business account is another good starting point, its an easy-to-use tool for businesses and organisations to manage their online presence across Google. To help customers find your business, you can verify your business and edit your business information. Anything that helps Google find your business is a good thing.
After putting in countless sleepless nights and downing numerous cups of coffee, we finally crafted a website ready for the World to see. It’s time to celebrate by avoiding obsessive tweaking, until of course, we notice areas that can be improved! 😧
To be continued…