Planning a Website? Check out our Web Design Checklist

web design buckighamshireAt Cyber Sushi Design, our experience of website requests range from clients with a precise idea of what they want with relevant collateral provided upfront to customers that don’t necessarily know where they need to start.

Whatever category you fall into, we are always happy to help! If you’ve never been involved in the web design process before and really don’t know where to start, we will hold your hand during the design process right through to launch and beyond if required.

Cyber Sushi Design: Web Designers Buckinghamshire

The team at Cyber Sushi Design, based in Buckinghamshire have put together the following checklist to give you an idea of what you need to consider to get your web design project well on its way.

Domain name – a domain name is the title of your site, the URL, the web address. For example: www.domainname.com.

    • Choose a name that is memorable
    • Decide whether to use “.com” or “.net” or “.co.uk” or any others

If you don’t already own your required domain name, at Cyber Sushi Design, we can register your website domain name on your behalf.

Web Hosting – hosting providers provide storage space, business email services and host your website, making it accessible to others across the Internet.

If you don’t have existing hosting arrangements or business email, Cyber Sushi Design can sign you up to our own hosting, providing you with a business email address such as info@*insertyourbusinessname*.com.

Audience – Establish what the purpose of your website is. If you are unable to explain it to a web designer, how do you expect to get your message across through your website to your target audience.

    • Have a clear picture in your mind of who your target audience are
    • Establish the message you want to portray to ensure your target audience connect with your website

Design – ensuring a clean, consistent, professional design and layout across your website will encourage visitors to access your site. Always opt to make usability and navigation simple.

    • Browse the internet for websites with a design or layout you like
    • Choose colours that identify with the service you offer for example if you’re promoting hypnotherapy you want to choose tranquil colours rather than bold, bright colours

Providing Cyber Sushi Design with the addresses of sites you like, colours and other preferences means that we can work to achieve a design and layout you are happy with from the off.

Illustration of components of structure of a website as the mechanism

Content – providing useful, informative text throughout your site will ensure visitors know what your website/business is offering. Search engines like to see that fresh, original content is added to your website on a regular basis, be it through new pages or a news/blog page.

    • Prepare well written content that informs and educates visitors to your site
    • Include keywords related to what your business offers to aid your ranking in search engines
    • Decide whether you want to include a news blog

Sometimes it can be a struggle to find the time or someone capable of writing website worthy text, that’s text that reads well and educates potential clients visiting your site and also informs search engine crawlers looking to rank your site. At Cyber Sushi Design we employ SEO Copywriters that can write website content or blog posts on your behalf or review text you have prepared and improve upon it where required.

Images – images can create a lasting impression with visitors to your site, particularly if they are of products / services that you sell.

    • Provide high resolution images preferably in jpeg format for upload to your website

The Cyber Sushi Design team are all proficient in Photoshop in case edits or enhancements to images are required.

Site Map – a site map is a page listing all accessible pages of a website, which can aid user navigation and search engine spiders that crawl the web.

    • Have an idea of the number of pages you want and what each page should be about e.g. About Us, Contact Us, Services etc

Pages often get added as projects develop, which is never a problem. At Cyber Sushi Design we can update site maps as and when changes happen.

Advertising & Pop ups – avoid over-populating your site with adverts, especially those with content irrelevant to your audience. Advertising and pop ups can be annoying and detract attention away from you site, potentially leading them to a competitor’s site.

Search Engine Optimisation Buckinghamshire

Here are a few extra tips for when you have a shiny new, all singing, all dancing website but nobody knows who you are or where to find you:

SEOsearch engine optimisation helps your site to be found among results for specific keywords related to your business

    • Ongoing optimisation ensures your site can be found easily in Google and other search engines

Cyber Sushi Design offer one off SEO in many of our web design packages, this allows you to launch with the best chance of ranking well. However, this won’t keep you up the rankings for long. To rank well ongoing search engine optimisation is required and you need to keep an eye on what that means when search engines schedule updates.

For example, following a Google update on April 21st websites without a mobile site will now be penalised. At Cyber Sushi Design, we made our clients aware of this and booked in a number of mobile sites to ensure their site rankings were maintained. As it happens a number of clients have since improved their rankings with the addition of their mobile website.

We offer a number of SEO packages, dependant on your needs; that take the responsibility of SEO off your shoulders. Although keep in mind that nobody can ever guarantee you a natural page one ranking, that’s in the hands of the search engine Gods; we do however, also, offer Pay Per Click which can get you in the paid results section on page one.

Social Media – embedding social media icons into your website can facilitate sharing content across social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter gaining you extra exposure.

    • Create social media accounts
    • Share blogs, offers, news and reviewswebsite design buckinghamshire

Cyber Sushi Design are experts in social media optimisation (SMO), whether you need us to create your social media profiles or boost your followers, having a presence across social media is the way forward for small businesses.

Analytics – tracking the analytics of your site gives you the ability to monitor its performance and rankings, which can help you understand how you need to be focusing on optimising your site.

    • Install Google Analytics and keep track of how your site is performing
    • Address any issues that your analytics highlight

Web Design Buckinghamshire

We like to feel we’ve covered the basics to help you prepare for your web design project. Any web designer worth their salt will offer you additional guidance but having the key aspects, as we’ve laid them out here, under your belt can save you time and money.

If you would like to discuss your web design project with the Cyber Sushi Design team you can get in touch with us on 01494 356 778. We are happy to talk through your requirements and work out your best options.