<\/h3>\n2. Create buyer personas to be strategic<\/h3>\n
This is one of the first steps in creating a website design strategy. You need to answer questions regarding who the site is addressed to.<\/p>\n
Buyer personas might be cards containing information on demographics, psychographics, life condition, budget, and profession of the target audience. The technique helps you segment your audience based on such criteria, and create the message according to these findings.<\/p>\n
Example of a buyer persona:<\/p>\n
![\"design](\"https:\/\/colibriwp.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/buyer-persona.png\")
Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n Buyer personas are useful for segmenting the public and configuring the right message that covers the whole area of people with different characteristics that are inclined to buy from you.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>To connect the company with its potential clients, you need to make visitors pass through key steps in browsing your website. This takes the form of the buyer journey, and accompanies the decision-making process, from research to actual purchase.<\/p>\n One popular customer journey model is AIDA:<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Now, the AIDA model isn’t the only one, depending on the complexity of the business, there are other customer journey frameworks out there. But, what you need to remember is that no matter the framework, it’s important to engaging create user touchpoints at every stage while trying to get them closer to a conversion.<\/p>\n It\u2019s essential to look at the competitors\u2019 websites. What are they doing well, what improvements should you bring to the market, how might your offer and your website be different from the competition?<\/p>\n Studying the competition can have some advantages, such as:<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to ask the most important question: what is the website built for?<\/p>\n A website goal can take one or more of these forms:<\/p>\n It\u2019s recommended that you set one main goal and 3 secondary goals that sustain the main one with adjacent results. Depending on these goals, your website might have a distinct design supporting them, with strategic elements in key locations.<\/p>\n A mood board is a way to collect different creative ideas with a view to preparing for a new project. It\u2019s the first concrete form of a website before actual web design takes form. It\u2019s used to convey a general idea about how the website will look like.<\/p>\n At this point, you have to define the brand: what is the message, and what is the unique value proposition?<\/p>\n To correctly define the brand, you have to answer each of the following questions:<\/p>\n After having thoroughly answered these questions, you\u2019ll be more prepared to properly integrate the brand strategy into the website design strategy.<\/p>\n To have a referring chart of pages and key points where the brand has put its imprint, you should create a sitemap. This might turn into a reference point, according to which web design develops within the agreed path. A sitemap will be a reference point that serves as guidance for website development.<\/p>\n Example of sitemap:<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n A sitemap gives a clear picture of the page architecture and of the website structure. It defines whether the website has a flat design or a pyramidal design (a flat design is recommended).<\/p>\n Structuring the information according to a strategy guarantees the efficiency of the web design. It helps to work methodically, according to pre-established rules and in consonance with the website communication strategy.<\/p>\n You set up the categories which pages fall in, the various levels of pages, and how each page links to other ones in the website structure.<\/p>\n This also increases the efficiency of modeling the message and organizing information within the whole website.<\/p>\n Having a sitemap is an essential condition of designing websites according to a strategy.<\/p>\n When it comes to search engine optimization, you need to think of keywords. Or better, topics with correlated keywords. In the era of semantic search, you\u2019re free to use synonyms and other words that form a topic through complementary terms.<\/p>\n These keywords must be included in your copy (visible on-site text). Also, it would help if you placed keywords in the title, META descriptions, and all the on-page\u00a0<\/span>header tags<\/span><\/a>\u00a0for better exposure. This way, linguistic terms signal to Google what the pages are about and help them rank better in search engine results.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Also, you should avoid using the same terms repeatedly on two or more pages, as you run the risk of keywords cannibalization.<\/p>\n Each page should have its own specific set of terms, that are different from other pages\u2019, and define the specific topic of that respective page.<\/p>\n But keywords should be naturally included in the copy of every page, and be a good representation of natural language. You address to people as you are a real person, and your language should naturally reflect this. Search engines will more than love this, as their algorithms are based on natural language processing.<\/p>\n Landing pages are independent web pages that can be well integrated into marketing campaigns. They have a meaning in themselves, and they can communicate a message irrespective of the other pages in the website. They contain their own message (which is part of the website message overall) that reaches users who see only those pages in the website. It\u2019s up to them if they continue browsing the website, or they make a purchase based on that convincing page itself.<\/p>\n The anatomy of a landing page:<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n The image below indicates which are the required elements of a landing page. Designing each website page as a real landing page will more than help with your marketing actions (each page should have its own purpose).<\/p>\n Therefore, when users land on one of the website pages from Google, they can treat it as a whole source of information, and enter the decision-making process from visiting that very page.<\/p>\n Important: a Call-to-Action should not miss from a landing page, hence from every page in the website. Strategically place content around that CTA button, so it naturally integrates into the page copy and sustains the message with the incentive to buy.<\/p>\n In fact, we highly recommend you consider the latter variant: two CTA buttons on a selling page (one at the top of, another one at the bottom of that page). Since the purpose of the page is to sell, it\u2019s best to make sure call-to-action buttons are at hand whenever visitors are on the respective page.<\/p>\n At the top of the page: maybe visitors are in a more advanced stage of the decision-making process.<\/p>\n Also, at the bottom of the page: after visitors have browsed through the useful information in the page and reached its bottom, they approach the buying stage, so they need a handy CTA button.<\/p>\n You need to catch the user in the decision-making phase they\u2019re in. That\u2019s why it\u2019s best to provide 2 CTA buttons in a selling page, a page whose main purpose is to close deals.<\/p>\n The new trend of placing a CTA button at the end of the menu is more than welcome: it leaves the web designer the sole concern to place one CTA button within the copy of the page (the second CTA is part of the menu).<\/p>\n Example of page with 2 CTA buttons:<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n When starting the website design, you should know how to structure information in each page. The goal is to make that page interesting to readers. You should avoid placing whole blocks of text in the website pages.<\/p>\n Structuring information in a web page has to account for: separating ideas through headings (h1, h2, H3\u2026); clearly delimitating paragraphs; underlining important information; marking key terms in bold or italics, and including much white space into the page. Also, illustrations and photos should support text, and reinforce what you present in the web page.<\/p>\n Example of content structure:<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n If you have two or more variants of structuring content within a page, and you\u2019re unsure which to choose, you should think of creating A\/B or multivariate tests. This way, you check which version is best, and more profitable for the website. Depending on which version gathers the most traffic, you\u2019ll choose that version for your website and thus maximize profits.<\/p>\n Maybe a different organization of your content, another sequence of arguments might entail different results. And being attentive to this difference in results might indicate you the best and most efficient page variant.<\/p>\n Having a mobile-responsive website is key in today\u2019s world. About 58% of visitors come from mobile devices, as compared to 42% coming from desktops (according to a study reflecting the 2018 situation<\/a>).<\/p>\n In this mobile-first world, it\u2019s essential that your website looks well on mobile devices.<\/p>\n So, your web design strategy should take into account optimization for mobile and tablet, and constantly check your website looks fine on smaller screens.<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n We hope this article gave you a clear picture of what the web design strategy should include. It should ease your work and make you design websites with clear objectives in mind. A well-created strategy connects the dots between website as a plan<\/a> and a website as a product. And the product cannot but be excellent, as we mentioned at the beginning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"3. Figure out a buyer\u2019s journey, within your web design strategy<\/h3>\n
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![\"AIDA](\"https:\/\/colibriwp.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/Screenshot_1.png\")
<\/p>\n4. Not the least important, study the competition<\/h3>\n
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5. What\u2019s the website goal? (Fundamental for your website design strategy)<\/h3>\n
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6. Create a mood board is an essential step in your web design strategy<\/h3>\n
7. Integrate brand strategy into web design<\/h3>\n
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8. Create a sitemap that integrates your website goals and the pages hierarchy<\/h3>\n
![\"sitemap](\"https:\/\/colibriwp.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/sitemap.png\")
9. Choose keywords to include in your copy<\/h3>\n
10. Think web design strategically. Create site pages as if they were landing pages<\/h3>\n
![\"think](\"https:\/\/colibriwp.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/landing-page.png\")
11. Place one, or better, two CTAs on each selling page<\/h3>\n
![\"CTAs](\"https:\/\/colibriwp.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/prezi.png\")
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12. Strategically design structure of information in each website page<\/h3>\n
![\"structure](\"https:\/\/colibriwp.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/content-structure.png\")
13. Strive to have a mobile-responsive website<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/colibriwp.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/web-design-concept-desktop-3d-rendering.jpg\")
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