What is web design best practice?
Best practice, within the context of website design, helps us define standards that are widely accepted as being correct or most effective within our industry (aka the entire internet).
What are the most important best practice standards?
The recommended “best practice” standards to define for a digital product:
- Establish your target audience.
- Define the users you’d like to attract.
- Establish your user interface (UI) style guide.
- Define crucial UI components such as typography, colors, buttons, and other brand elements.
- Create an insightful user experience (UX) through a simplified navigation and user flow.
- Define all interactions that occur within a product or website and choose the simplest path for the user.
- Create an effective layout for each page type.
- Define clear layouts for your parent pages, child pages, category pages, and single product pages.
- Design for mobile before desktop, using a responsive grid.
- Design multiple views for each page type based on your responsive grid, starting with a mobile view and moving to a desktop view.
- Prepare your website for search engine optimization (SEO).
- Define metadata used for Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines.
- Optimize each page of your website for social media sharing.
- Optimize your website load time.
- Define how fast your website loads and identify any areas that need improvement, like image compression.
- Publish high quality content.
- Establish credibility and give users a reason to return.