Crafting an Exceptional User Experience: Best Practices for Website Design that Includes UX, Blogging, and SEO

Mar 13, 2024

4 min read

According to a Forbes article “88% of online users won’t return to a site after a bad experience.” (Haan, 2023). That’s a big number. Building an effective website goes beyond just the brand colors and pictures. It’s critical to think about the buyer journey with the end goal in mind. This blog will highlight some best practices for website design, user experience, and how to build a site so it’s optimized for search engines with an integrated blog strategy.

Website User Experience Best Practices

What is website design and why does it matter? First, a website is one of a business's most important assets. Think about the customer from the start. The design should make it easy and intuitive to navigate.

Four Questions to Answer to Get Started:

What do current, and future customers want to learn?
Where do they go to get this information?
What do they need to do?
How will they complete a transaction?

Another important component is to develop buyer personas and a buyer journey. Once those questions are answered, with a clear purchase journey and persona, these elements come together and become the guide to a site’s information architecture.

Information architecture is how information is structured and presented on a website. It’s a critical element when designing a website to put relevant information together. Make it easy, and intuitive, for users to find the information they need. One way to do this is to create a visual diagram of how to present and organize information.

The image above shows an example of an information architecture diagram.

Created by Amanda Kruit

With a clear picture of how information will be structured, it’s time to create a visual outline for the look of the website. Draw the layout of the main pages, and site navigation, with paper and pen. Then take that, and create a digital wireframe, on one of the many digital wireframing tools.

Best Practices for Website Design:

Design with common conventions in mind:
- Utilize a clear hero at the top of the site (this may vary from site to site).
- Build an understandable, easy-to-navigate, main navigation at the top.
- Logos should go on the top left.
- Look at industry commonalities and build with that in mind.
Find the balance between presenting information and the aesthetics of the brand and site.
Remember the goal is to get a user to convert.
- Build calls to action (CTA’s) strategically into the site.

With a clear picture of one’s users, what a user will do on the site, and how information will be presented, then consider how the site will be found in the first place. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

SEO Optimizations for a Website

An article by Search Engine Land, states that SEO should be a top consideration from the beginning of planning and designing a website, not an afterthought. (Miller, 2023).

Here are some best practices when optimizing for SEO:

Plan out the technical components of SEO such as hosting and what CMS to build on.
Build the site to be mobile-responsive.
Utilize alt tags across all media such as images.
Speed is critical – reducing media sizes to help with this.
Is the site easy to use? If not, people will bounce quickly, which indicates a bad experience for search engines.
Identify the customer journey and create content for various stages in the funnel.
Research and identify keywords and build the site without duplicate pages.

Optimizing a website for search is an ongoing effort and is something that will never truly be done. With that in mind, one final important element of a website is planning for and creating content for a blog.

Blogging Best Practices for a Website

A blog is a great way to communicate with prospective customers and get a site found on search engines. Get clear on the buyer, what’s important to them, and the overall message to convey. When a person comes to a blog… the content they come across should align with the individual and/or the business.

Three Things to Consider When Creating a Blog

The focus of a blog should be to bring value to the site users.
Integrate the blog into the website’s navigation and make it easy to find.
When one spends time creating valuable content on a blog, share it on other channels like social media.

Crafting an exceptional user experience on a website goes beyond aesthetics. With so many websites and content available, incorporating thoughtful design, user-centric strategies, and SEO from the beginning is crucial. Take into consideration both the technical and non-technical requirements of search engines and integrate a blog strategy with both the user and SEO in mind. Follow these best practices for website design, user experience, SEO, and blogging, to have a great website that fosters long-term engagement and loyalty from one’s ideal customers.