4. Have Good UX Design Elements

You need be able to edit your website and be able to see the results as if it were live.

While doing this you need to have a page published in place of your website telling people that your website is under construction and going to be published soon.

 We recommend using the free under construction plugin which will do this for you, it is very easy to use.

Install it follow the instructions and select the screen you want the public to see, switch the 'under construction' button to on and your ready to start editing your website.

OK lets get building.

If you already have a website you need to edit in the way described in the following sections.

If this is a fresh build you may want to read our post How to Create a Website first.

A well thought out layout:-

All world class websites have one design feature in common, they are  fresh, crisp and uncluttered with intelligent use of white space.

Use harmonious soft color palettes with no garish colors, with a contrasting colour to make your 'call to action' button stand out.

Too much visual clutter overloads the senses and rather than spend time exploring your website  your visitors will bounce (leave without entering your website).

No loud noise:- 

Unless you have a signature video on your landing page do not load automatic music or  video play.

Let your visitor decide if they want to listen to or watch media. No one likes being shouted at, when your website loads and starts generating noise that is what you are doing, shouting at people.

Minimise adverts:-

World Class Websites don't carry many adverts, they promote their own products, but for the small business and blogs paid advertising is a good source of revenue but it has to done carefully.

Preferably none on your landing or home page, then just one per page, a banner or sidebar sky scraper may be more effective than a simple box ad. 100% of visitors will read an advert if it's the only one on the page, only 76% will read it if there are multiple ads on the page.

If you must use more than one you can drop a box in among the content, or use a content appropriate inline ad.

Be carefull with Googles Adsense ads, they need to be seen as an addition to the page not  intruding into it. Adsense Autoads can cause problems as they can randomly appear  anywhere on the page.

No Pop-ups:-

Or any elements that slide in which obscure the content. Google will penalize your website  if this happens on mobiles.

For desk tops, if you have a slide in or pop up call to action box or form, time them to come in after about 20 seconds, your visitor will be engaged with your content and is more likely to pay attention and respond.

Instant pop-ups are annoying, why work to get someone to land on your page then obscure the content with an instant page wide pop-up?

Fast loading:-

Even World class websites can have loading issues. Google ranks you on speed, the aim is for every page to load in under 2 seconds, for every second people have to wait after that they will navigate away (53% after 3 seconds).

Use Google webmasters free PageSpeed insights tool or GTmetriix to check your load speeds and give you info on how to solve loading speed issues.

Check both desktop and mobile loading times.

5. Clean Up Your Website Navigation

Discoverable:-

Discreet but obvious navigation bar, don't make your visitor search for a tiny button that shoots out a menu, but don't plaster big buttons all over the page.

Do not have too many navigation  buttons, if you have lots of pages load them into categories so when someone hovers over the headings they  see a drop down menu, or put the categories in a sidebar. (See how apple put them in the footer sidebar)

Consistency:-

Keep menus on the same place on every page.

Accuracy:-

Visitors need to know where they are going, your navigation labels need to be concise and accurate.

Categories:-

Keep category headings visually divided  from subcategories use bold fonts, indents, buttons etc..

Search:-

If your website has a search feature (it should) make sure it works, can compensate for misspellings  and whatever is typed in it will never give a page or product not found.

If what is typed in does not exist a list of related items or pages should be shown.

404 Page not found:-

Use a stylized 404 page as a marketing tool to guide visitors back into the site by offering money off vouchers or site specific content encouraging them to navigate to pages / items that do exist.

Images:-

Make sure every  image has an ALT text. The alt attribute provides alternative information for an image if a user for some reason cannot view it, or if the user uses a screen reader.

You need visitors to see what the image is about is even if the image does not appear.

Make links workable:-

If it is a navigation feature make it a clickable link, if the cursor changes to indicate a link and it doesn't do something when clicked your visitor will think something is broken.

6. Making Great Content 

Readability:-

Everything should be written in plain English (assuming it's an English language site) minimise the waffle and leave out the cooperate and technical jargon.

Have a look at these extracts from some web development websites landing and about me pages, they forget they are talking to laypeople not their own co-workers.

Search Engine Optimisation is how you 'tune' your website in line with the rules Google have for making what they say is a good website.

The more compliant it is with their rules the higher ranking (page authority) they give it, and the higher up the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) it will be when someone enters a search term for what your offering on your website.

It's advisable to do what Google say as over 90% of all searches are through Google.

Read our articles:-

Managing your own SEO and Doing your own SEO for free to learn how easily include basic SEO as you add content to your  site.

Black Hat SEO:-

Stay away from any SEO tactics Google  disapprove of, these tactics are known at Black Hat SEO using them will get you penalised,

Penalties include;  black listing, dropping your website down the page listings and  killing your website  by removing it from the listings.

Keyword Stuffing:-

Do not  stuff your content with keywords (words you want people to look for so your site lists in the SERPs).

Googles web crawlers look for naturally written content relative to your website and will penalize the website if too many keywords are found on one page.

See our Article on Keyword Planning to see how to find and use keywords on your website.

Organic SEO:-

Following the UX tips in sections 4, 5 and 6 and the methods in our articles is called organic or natural SEO.

These are steps taken to get your website listed as high as possible th in the SERPs without using paid for advertising, or Pay Per Click (PPC) that's paying to appear when someone enters a keyword relevent to what you are offering on your website.

Organic SEO should be a natural part  of your web design process, use our 10 DIY SEO Tips and Articles on Basic SEO to help with this.

If you need more help you can use our SEO tool

8. Cohesiveness

World class websites have a single brand identity and colour scheme that crosses all channels.

The website, social media platforms, advertising and any non digital media such as magazine or newspaper advertising, have to be instantly recognisable as being part of the same business.

Make sure that everything works together smoothly, if your visitor skips to your Facebook or Twitter pages you don't want to lose them.

9. Final Checks.

Revisit your websites design

Is it clean, fresh and uncluttered?

If your landing page has a signature video, fine if not  switch off  automatically loading media

Remove unnecessary over-bloated pages, if a page is too long trim it and use the excess as a blog post.

Remove excessive advertising only include one or two  that are relevant to your content or industry.

Check all your links work:-

Make sure all your pages, especially the ones deep in your site (without links on nav bars or menus), are internally linked to from other pages.

Make sure paid ads have 'no follow links', see our Quick Guide to Internal Linking for how to easily clean up your linking structure.

Check each pages load speed:-

Use Googles Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix which will give load speeds for both mobile devices and desktop, identify faults and tell you how to fix them. Your maximum page load speed should be 2 seconds.

Optimise images:-

Make sure all your images are as small as they can be without losing definition and are optimized, there are plenty of free WordPress plug-ins which do this for you.

They must have the ALT tags filled in, this is the description  which appears if the image does not load.

Googles spiders will not read more than 16 words so make this the max and include one keyword.

Make keywords relevant:-

They must match your content. Where possible use 'long tailed keywords' so people looking for what you provide have more chance of finding you and give you a better chance of appearing on page one of SERPs.

See our  article on Keyword Planning to see how to use long tailed keywords.

Socail media:-

Have a Facebook page and Twitter account  (Linked in, Instagram and more if you can service them)  with social media follow and share icons on all pages.

Google Watch:-

Check Googles Webmaster Guidelines from time to time to keep up with  what Google wants (and doesn't want) from websites, the more you comply with their guidelines the better your chances of ranking well in the SERPs

10 Launch Your World Class Website

When you've double checked all the prelaunch steps in section 9 you are ready to go so switch the 'under construction' button to off and your website is now live.

Look at your website on as many devices as possible, different mobiles, tablets laptops and PCs, different sized screens and with as many browsers as possible.

Some websites may look different on Safari or Opera than on chrome or Firefox.  You want to see no matter which device, browser or size screen, a brilliant website.

Check the menus show up and the links work.

Now sit back and treat yourself to your favourite beverage, you've earned it.

To keep your website World Class  you need to keep checking it and make sure that WordPress and  plugins are updated when needed, that your links to external websites are working (other sites can go down).

A  Mekatrig managed website hosting plan will make sure your website is updated, scanned daily for malware and give you backup protectionwith 1-click site restore in case of disasters.

 Mekatrig Manged WordPress Plans