Effective website design Gold Coast is a critical part of every business’ marketing these days. Failing to understand what web design principles need to be considered can seriously hinder your business’ reputation and credibility online.

In fact, you have 6-9 seconds to engage a website visitor. Failing to do so in this time will encourage them to leave and find a better alternative, in the form of a competitor.

While there are many factors that must be considered in effective web design Gold Coast, we will touch on some of the key ones below.

Load Speed: The load speed of your website can make or break your business online. Studies show that for every extra second your web page takes to load; conversions decrease by 12%. This can obviously be incredibly detrimental for businesses who rely on their website to drive new business.

Layout: If a user can’t find the information they need easily, they will leave as quickly as they arrived. The key to enhancing the user experience is having simple, easy to use navigation. You also must sure your content is structured in a logical way that makes it easy for the user to move through to other pages. Consumer psychology should ultimately guide the website layout.

Written Content: The content on your website plays a vital role in engaging new customers. After all, as they say, content is king. Using software such as SEMrush, we can isolate the phrases your customers are using to find you and your competitors, to ensure we are weaving this into the website copy effectively.

Visual Content: Whether it be images, videos, or custom designed icons, visual content should support your website’s key messaging and written content. We may not like to admit it, but as humans, we are lazy. We want information communicated to us in a way that requires little to no effort for us to consume. The visual content on your website should be testament to your key points of difference and product or service capabilities. 

WordPress themes bring a range of advantages to your web design Gold Coast process. We utilise these themes to ensure that your website design is fully customisable, mobile optimised, easy to maintain, secure, and scalable.

As WordPress was initially designed to support blogging content, it is extremely user-friendly. The platform supports a range of companies from highly complex multinational corporations to small businesses and start-ups, truly becoming a tool for all. As your business is ever-changing, we need to ensure that we use a theme that is adaptable for such change. Your website design Gold Coast needs to look good on every device, no matter the odd shape or size. By utilising our WordPress themes, we can ensure that your website is fully mobile optimised and ready for your audience to navigate, no matter their device of choice.

Following the completion of your website design Gold Coast project, we will ensure that it is not only easy for you to maintain, but also effortless for you to make changes to. At Marketing Sweet, our website designer Gold Coast provide you with complimentary one-on-one training. This will ensure that you are comfortable making changes to your website on an ongoing basis. This will not only save you time, but will reduce the costs associated with contacting an external web developer. Our themes ensure your website remains secure. Unlike some websites, your WordPress theme continually updates and thus, provides an enhanced layer of security.

As one of the best web design companies Gold Coast, by using our themes, you will be able to update text, change images, and even add pages to your website. Our website designer Gold Coast will arm you with the skills to confidently make changes. However, if you ever need a hand, we are just a phone call away! To ensure this is as easy as possible for you, our web designer Gold Coast will also provide you with a training video. This way, you’ll be able to refer back to the information provided in your training regarding how to make changes to your new WordPress website. 

Theme updates are important, as they ensure your website is always available on the latest version of the CMS, such as WordPress. This will ensure you always have access to the latest features, and any security enhancements can be made. Updating your website theme to the newest available version is also a bit tick in Google’s books.

Similarly, plugin updates allow for more features and functionality to websites without having to alter or manually write any code. With so many plugins available, it is important that they are always kept up to date to ensure they are maintaining their proper function and purpose. 

Updating themes and plugins also has benefits regarding web design Gold Coast. Some of these include:

Increased Site Speed: An outdated theme or plugin can slow your site’s speed, hence frustrating your visitors who’ll leave for other, faster websites. New plugin releases often include updates aimed at increasing the website speed. Web pages that have faster loading times keep internet users engaged and record fewer bounce rates. An improved site speed is also essential for SEO, which leads to an increase in the number of organic visitors.  

Improved Security: If your CMS is a free open source platform, its source code is available in the public domain. That makes it easy for hackers to take advantage of the platform’s security vulnerabilities and access it. Also, automated bots constantly search the internet, including websites, for security holes and vulnerabilities to exploit. 

One of the best ways to secure your site from such attacks is to update it regularly. Theme and plugin updates can patch any vulnerabilities, thus boosting your site’s security.  

Bug Fixes: Although the theme and plugin’s new releases come with new tools and features, they can have glitches or bugs. Bugs may go unnoticed despite extensive testing of new software releases. Updating the system helps to fix the bug or glitch and enhances your website’s functionality.  

Every business with a website should be trying to outrank its competitors in search engine results. One way of doing this is through understanding and acting upon Google’s algorithm, to get ahead of others in the same industry.

One of the metrics that can help you outrank your competition is Authority. Search engines use authority to determine the relevance of your website. As such, authority impacts the visibility and ranking of your website on search engines. Google works to deliver quality content from authoritative sources, because this is what their users have come to know and expect. Google is a giant library, and businesses are books. It is Google’s job to advertise it’s ‘best sellers’ first, as those most likely to answer their user’s queries.

Authority also goes hand in hand with your website’s credibility. Producing content that is deemed highly valuable to the end user will ultimately see your Authority score improve. Using the Moz software, we can measure two key kinds of website authority:

Domain Authority (DA): A score from 1-100 that indicates how likely your website as a whole is expected to rank on Google. The higher the score, the better chance your website has of ranking. However, the goal is not to reach 100 – it is simply to out-score your competitors.

Typically, websites with a high number of quality, external links will have higher DA scores. On the other hand, small businesses and those with little or no inbound links will receive low DA scores. Websites on brand new domains will always start out with a DA score of 1, with this number increasing over time in line with SEO work.

Page Authority (PA): Where DA considers your entire website, PA scores indicate how likely an individual website page is to rank on Google. With scores from 1-100, PA scores change between pages on your site based on elements such as content relevance and external linking.

As one of the best web design companies Gold Coast, Marketing Sweet, we know the importance of building websites that not only look incredible, but have the potential to rank well on Google. SEO principles are the driving force behind out website builds. While our website designer Gold Coast designs your website, we will also work to educate you on what to do next, to ensure you can get the most out of your website.

Our SEO Scientist is the expert in all things Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). They ensure that campaigns are progressing effectively, manage backlinking, guest blogging, and the technical side of campaigns. As they are our experts, they have significant input into how we design our websites.

As one of the best web design companies Gold Coast, all our websites are designed with SEO in mind. With the backend of WordPress renowned for its user-friendly nature, it won’t hinder your creation of a campaign either now in the future. We also install a plugin called ‘Yoast’, which helps to ensure that any content you put on the website can be easily SEO’ed, meaning it satisfies Google’s algorithm in terms of readability, keyword density, sentence structure, and more! This is an imperative consideration if you want your website to rank on Google. And, lets be honest, why have a website if it doesn’t rank?

Did you know that Google takes around 200 factors into account when it comes to ranking websites? Our web designer Gold Coast always consider these factors when building your website, and will make recommendations for the design and functionality based on some of the most vital elements. Things such as mobile optimisation, page speed, optimised content and user experience absolutely must be considered. Our SEO Scientist works closely with our team to ensure all of these elements are satisfied prior to finalising the website project.

Mobile optimisation is a significant factor to consider when launching your website. In recent years, people have moved to browsing on their mobile devices rather than desktops. Therefore, Google prioritises websites that are friendly to both. Our web designer Gold Coast will ensure that you have a responsive website that resizes for all mainstream devices. Further, they ensure that your site has large enough fonts to ensure readability on smaller screens, hamburger menus for mobile use, and no hidden content or elements.

Page speed is another significant factor that is considered when building your website, and considers usability and user experience. This continues to be important for both mobile and desktop sites, and therefore is a major consideration when creating your web design project.

Our SEO Scientist sits in the background of every website project to ensure that it is geared up to tackle SEO, either now or in the future.