14 Mar 2024
User experience has always been a ‘must’ for Ally in our website design projects. Over the last 7 years, we've seen UX become a necessity for other web designers in the industry, making the competition tougher than ever.
Websites that work: Website design for user experience
Key factors to consider when going up against your business's competitors online include making sure your website is up to the job, with strong SEO, fresh content, a responsive design and - most importantly - good user experience.
User-friendly features influence a visitor's decision as to whether or not they want to make a transaction or submit an enquiry, and can be as simple as the length of a title or the colour of a call-to-action button! For a website that works, converting visitors into business, a positive user experience driven towards conversion and created through intelligent website design is essential.
Ally’s in-house website design team designs and builds our clients' websites from scratch in HTML and CSS. Building a website in code view allows us to be as creative and unique as we wish (working to the client's brief, of course!), rather than being restricted by the use of a template-based website builder, for example WordPress or Wix.
Sketching and wireframing is always Ally’s starting point when it comes to any website design or development project. A website wireframe is used to lay out the main features and navigation of a new website, allowing us to design and assess the overall end user experience right from the outset, before considering visual design elements such as the addition of content, images and colour schemes.
When creating the website’s wireframe it's important to keep the navigation's hierarchy and organisation of content simple, enabling users to easily navigate to - and find - the website page they're looking for, thereby increasing the length of time they stay on the website and increasing the chances of them taking an action, such as submitting an enquiry.
Sketching and wireframing should be a key part of every website designer’s early development process. While it may be the most time consuming aspect of website design, it's certainly the most important step to designing a website that works!
Wireframing a website design:
Up next is designing the website. This step tends to come naturally if your happy with your sketching and wireframing.
Colours play a significant role in user experience design. So, choosing the right colour palette that works for both the client's brand and website is vital, as it divides elements, creates contrast and highlights important features, such as Calls-To-Actions which increases conversions.
Wouldn't you agree that bright text on a bright background would be difficult to read? Well, this is why accessibility features are another important factor to consider when designing a website, including:
And so, we have reached the finishing step to creating an unmatched user experience website. Building the website.
Ally’s website experts highly recommended building a website using HTML and CSS, as it comes with zero restriction with how creative you want the site and part of great user experience is down to how the website has been coded.
Coding your website from scratch comes with many benefits that a website builder lacks, such as:
Fast Performance: Coding your website allows you to access the back end and remove any errors or make any updates quick and easy. As there is less data to load, pages will load faster, smoother and pixels will align clearly which increases positive user experience.
Customisation: Hand-coded websites gives you full creative control of its design. You can style all elements, add custom animations, and make site designs unique to meet client briefs.
Integrations: Coding websites from scratch lets you integrate with any tools or application programming interface (API). Wide compatibility makes coding suitable for websites with diverse business goals.
Easy migration: You can easily migrate your hand-coded websites to other hosting providers, saving time and increasing website build productivity.
Reliable Security: As the code is unique, potential hackers will find it 10x more difficult to launch an attack.
Established 2009, Ally is a full-service marketing and creative agency in Leigh, Greater Manchester. Looking after everything a business needs to achieve the outcomes it’s looking for, whether that's more sales, more leads, greater brand awareness or a sleek new look online and offline. Ally's online and offline marketing services Define, Develop and Grow brands to achieve real – proven! - results.
Work including branding, web development and graphic design, to copywriting, content marketing, SEO and PPC, Ally delivers for local, national and international brands as a marketing partner committed to the success of our client organisations.
Want a website with unmatched user experience? Contact Ally today to start your web design project!
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