Are you about to embark on your website development project? Building a remarkable website that is clean, robust, scalable, intuitive, and represents your brand at the beginning stage is not fancy and convenient. However, it brings you the result you desire in the long run.
Prospects unconsciously size-up your business and the quality of your services with the way your website appears to them.
For that reason, you don’t want to put up a subservient website. Astounding web development in 2020 relies on seven equally important elements. They are the seven pillars, that’d guide your expectations and standards for your web development partners. Let’s get to it.
7 Pillars Of Website Development In 2020
- Content
- UX Design
- Performance
- Compatibility
- Scalability
- SEO
- Accessibility
Content
Content is a word thrown around so very often, but it is very relevant to your website development. As a result, you’d have to create all the necessary content that you should, at the building stage of your website. Here are important content types to give attention to and how to deliver them.
1.Website Copy
It’s of great significance to have an efficient copy for your website. For instance, your website copy has to be clear and concise while maintaining a consistent tone across all pages. So, this takes care of your human-audience. However, to cater to search engine needs, you should engage SEO-boosting keywords relevant to your website. More importantly, ensure you use these keywords naturally and organically (without unnecessary keyword stuffing) – search engines have a nose for it. It makes your copy feel less natural and difficult to read, as well.
2. Images
High-quality, engaging images tend to keep visitors scrolling on your website. If you are looking to create a professional website with consistently high-fidelity images on every page, then you already know mobile phone shots won’t cut it. Additionally, ensuring brand materials and logo consistency across your website speaks all hues of professionalism. So, you can get professional photographers and graphics designers that can help you achieve that goal.
3. Blog
A regularly updated blog is priceless. For that reason, it’s important to have an efficient editorial calendar that includes resourceful, informational, and problem-solving posts, that are not product-centered or promote your business. Because, as a business, your blog lets you position yourself as an industry thought leader.
4. Videos
A closer look at web interactions shows that videos get more impressions and drive more engagement. As a result, more businesses are beginning to include them in their content strategy. You, too, can leverage this content type to create the right mix of resources on your website.
Wholesome content should be an integral part of your process and plan. So, it’s important to cater to it at the early stages of your web development process. However, it doesn’t have to be painstaking. There are a lot of good content creators available to take the burden off of you if you do not have one in-house.
UX Design
Simply put, your UX design is essential to developing a remarkable website. As a result, it is responsible for how your website visitors perceive your website. So, your website UX design should be clean, smooth, clutter-free, and intuitive to keep site visitors on it.
Partnering with an experienced website development team can ensure top-tier website experience. More so, here are things to give attention:
1. User Flow Chart
Users don’t want to spend unnecessary time clicking back and forth to complete tasks on your website, which makes flow charts very important. Come up with a flow chart before developing the website. It puts things in perspective, not just for you, but also gives ease to users.
2. Team Inputs
While creating a UX design for your website, it’s relevant to let all your teams weigh in. The different teams have a unique understanding of how users interact with their aspect of the business – marketing, sales, support, etc. You’d need all that idea, eventually.
3. Feedback
Put into consideration the feedback you get from early users during your MVP testing. You’d get a good perspective of website user expectations. Then, you can easily match those expectations with an astounding UX design.
Performance
Now, here’s the part where every work you’ve put into your website content, aesthetics, and user experience, would either count or go to waste. An effective and efficiently performing website should have the capacity to keep up with rapid popularity. The capacity of the website to do this depends on the robustness of the code and technology stacks.
So, it’s important to put more into getting superior coding at the initial stage than face unnecessary issues when you scale.
Compatibility
The adaption of your website to different devices and browsers is key. A lot of users access the web using multiple devices. Similarly, because most users prefer certain browsers over others, some browsers are used more in some regions than others. Simply put, your website should be accessible to users irrespective of the device or browser.
So, run early compatibility tests on your website – and make it regular. A single line of defective code could make your website inaccessible on a browser, for instance.
Scalability
Codes are a central aspect of your website development. Because codes give the website functionality, beauty, usability, and keep it running, the initial code has to be precise, scalable, and robust.
A scalable code retains its integrity as you add new functionality and grow more users. That is to say that your website would perform optimally for 100 users as it will for 50,000 users. Consider having a DevOps team that’d maintain your website performance as you scale.
SEO
You know that the good content and resources you create are relevant when your site pops up in relevant searches. As sweet as it sounds, it, however, makes Search Engine Optimization a consistent challenge.
Also, more importantly, several factors can either bolster or undermine your SEO efforts.
1. Links
It’s important to manually check all external links that drive traffic to your website, frequently. As much as a healthy link could drive enormous traffic to your website, a broken or missing link can do more damage unnoticed.
2. Quality Content
Likewise, posting original and relevant content on your blog, doesn’t just make you a thought leader. It also helps your rank up on search results. You can focus on creating more informational content than self-promoting and product-centered articles that are keyword-stuffed.
3. Algorithms
Search engines like Google constantly makes changes to standards for algorithms to reward and penalize you based on your content and SEO. So, keeping up with search engine algorithms can help you stay ahead. Ultimately, you’d know what are the best practices at every point.
Accessibility
Accessibility would have easily fit into UX design, but I feel it’s earned the spot here. Recently, people and businesses are considering this factor more in their web development. It’s more than just about the ease of locating the menu button or the search bar.
Ideally, it caters more to the need of the user at the moment, such that two users can have different unique experiences while interacting with the same element on your website. For example, features like adjusting colour (inversion or contrast), magnification, text-to-speech, language translation, and so on, improves accessibility.
What’s The Catch
You are sure on your way to creating a remarkable website if you consider these factors of website development. To make it even simpler, here‘s a summary for you:
- It’s important to make content a core part of your overall goal with an efficient content strategy.
- Treat your website UX design as a necessity before building.
- Ensure your code has high performance and is robust.
- Run compatibility tests for your website frequently on different devices and browsers.
- Make sure your initial codes can scale with you, if you’re looking to grow.
- Keep up with SEO best-practices for your website.
- Improve the accessibility of your website.
Would you like Start Innovation Hub to be your web development partner?
Check out more information about Start Innovation Hub’s website development and feel free to contact us.
