Best Web Design Practices: Tips for Creating Websites That Deliver

Adhering to best web design practices offers advantages that go far beyond delivering a web site that looks good and loads quickly. The best practices for web design that have evolved over the history of the Web involve techniques that make your web design more useful to your visitors and more profitable to your business. Choosing a web design company that understands and follows the best web design practices ensures that your website will:

-Be easy to navigate

-Play well with all browsers

-Get your content indexed with search engines

-Ensure the privacy of your site visitors

-Provide a high level of security for your data

-Be accessible to all users on as many platforms as possible

When you’re overseeing the design of a new website or the redesign of an existing one, ensuring that your web designers follow best web design practices will guarantee that people can find your website, navigate it easily, find what they’re looking for and feel secure when communicating sensitive data like credit card numbers.

These tips can help you spot areas where your designers used best practices when you’re checking over your site.

1.Access your website from all of the major browsers to be sure that it looks right in each of them. You should include at least Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome.

2.Run your website through a W3C compliance checker to be sure that all of the underlying code conforms to the best web design practices recommended by W3C.

3.Check the contact page to be sure that they’ve provided several options for your customers and site visitors to reach your company. Phone numbers, email addresses and online contact forms each have advantages. By providing a choice of ways to contact you, you’ll engage as many of your customers as possible.

4.Look for a consistent navigation scheme throughout your website. Your visitors shouldn’t have to look for the menus in a different place on each page. Inconsistency confuses potential customers, and confused potential customers often leave rather than trying to figure things out.

5.Go over the website’s back end to be sure that it’s easy to update and maintain. The best web design companies will make it easy for you to make changes to your own website without needing complicated maintenance plans to take care of simple updates.

6.Ask your web design professionals to explain what they’ve done to make your site friendly to search engines. Search engine optimization has its own set of best practices and the best web designs will take them into account.

7.Look for social media integration and incorporation. The trend in best web design practices is to make it easy for your customers to share their experiences with your company and website. Facebook like buttons and Tweet Me buttons using recognizable icons invite your web site visitors to tell all their friends about their new find.