Web Design Tools for Tomorrow

It’s the intelligent nexus of brand and business, creativity and sales goals, storytelling and user experience — a digital distillation of best practices in aesthetics and metrics.

For maximum effectiveness, a company website must be more than crafted through accepted best practices and latest digital advances: it must be an exemplar of them — and not just by current standards but for the foreseeable future.

Your target audience’s actions — or inaction — is the measure of how compellingly your site harnesses and delivers the potential of today’s user experience.

In other words, design is destiny.

Consider the following web design checklist essentials. Does your site deliver the goods in five minutes or less, the average time spent on a unique site?

• Solves the user’s problem convincingly
• Tells your story concisely and honestly
• Provides motivation to intuitively navigate
• Clearly presents effortless calls-to-actions
• Embodies elegance, memorability, simplicity

Increasingly widespread adoption of mobile smart devices has given new dimension and demand for crafting resonant brand messaging and interfaces that expediently drive users to tangible goals.

By 2015, more people in the U.S. will access the web from mobile devices than desktops.  At Sherpa! Web Studios, we’re already seeing some clients serve 1/3 of their total web traffic to mobile devices.

In addition to designing sites specific to mobile, responsive design has become a leading framework, allowing users to access a single source across devices and browsers that adapts to the viewing environment through proportion-based grids and images with minimum resizing and scrolling.

Other tools and insights continue to proliferate for fine-tuning design, most recently Google Analytics’ Content Experiments. Through A/B testing, this optimization tool allows your site to serve up to five different variations of content and features, evaluating the best organization to maximize conversions.

Considering a redesign? Start by reflecting on our 25 Questions for Website Redesign. Then contact a sherpa, and tell us more.