Designing the Perfect Website: User Experience and Beyond

foreign [Music] [Music] I'm Jason Bitner from triple helix Corporation and Welcome to our Helix Insider podcast I'm joining the studio today with my developer Pedro Lopez and my director of marketing Lauren going hello everybody so today we wanted to talk to you about the importance of having a good website I think in this day and age we're all pretty familiar with how important it is but these days there's a lot more to websites than just simply having an online presence and we know here at triple helix that having a good website is a good indicator of how your company is performing how you look to the outside world and the importance of having a fresh looking website that's modern and up to date make sure that your audience and your customers are looking at you as a company that is Progressive and actually a modern so what I wanted to do today was uh talk to my team here about some of the things that we understand that represent good websites and so page I want to start with you on what

we call user experience or experience design talk to some of our listeners about what that means so that's a that's essentially what it means is having a user have a positive a positive experience like when they're visiting a website or a system right uh they want to be able to have usability meaning they want to be able to navigate and find the things that they're supposed to find you know get access to the information that uh someone's trying to convey with the website uh it needs to be accessible by everybody you know people that have maybe disabilities or um you know don't necessarily you know have certain types of Acts common access to to the website and it needs to be user centered so when people are developing a website uh they need to keep the user first in mind in order to be able to develop something that they can properly use um you know it's very important you know if people have a positive interaction with your website that's basically like the first interaction that they

have with your company and having a positive experience kind of sets the stage for uh you know people to have a you know trust the brand trust the company trust the services that they provide no that's a very good point um now we know not only is the experience important but the actual design itself and the Aesthetics and and how these uh newer sites are actually positioned so that they look polished and professional Lauren you've spent quite a bit of time in this area I want to talk to our listeners about the design aesthetic and how important that is in a new modern website yeah absolutely yeah development team and um others in the marketing industry work on a variety of different websites over the years and you know if you look at a website that was created you know many years ago versus a website that was created today there's a lot of noticeable differences and like Pedro was speaking to user experience the way you lay a website out and design a website the different elements you

include the different pages you include all plays into that user experience um so it's really important that you create a modern site that's easy for people to access easy for people to navigate and has different elements that really showcase your brand in a super positive light so things like embedding videos such as this podcast or your Brand's podcast on pages in your website so people can put you know a face to to a brand um putting your social feeds and vetting those into your site so you can see what's going on on social showcasing you know maybe your Instagram feed if you have a lot of great content on Instagram or Facebook really highlighting those elements on a website having blogs blogs are something that is so understated but so incredibly important blogs are a long-term project a lot of people think when they start doing blog posts that they're going to see instantaneous results the purpose of blogs is really to increase and boost your credibility over time which in turn will

help you to appear higher up in search engine rankings organically so when you're creating blogs you know there's an art form that goes into that making sure that you're including relevant keywords that matter to your brand into your industry without sounding like it was written by a machine or written completely by AI you want to make sure you're sounding natural your tone is conversational and you're using keywords that really resonate with your intended audience so having a really solid blog on your website is important and also posting constantly I see a lot of websites where people might have a Blog that appears as though their posting consistent content but there's no dates it's really hard to gauge how often content's actually being posted there's kind of a general rule of thumb in marketing that when you until you get to about 100 posts on your website you should really be posting blogs at least once a month if not more we really like to try to post them once a week if we can um

and that's really what I encourage for new brands as well as you boost credibility and your blogs become more prevalent you can kind of space that out but it's really important to post consistent relevant content that resonates with your audience so making sure your website's optimized with those different tools um to really just make sure you have solid branding and a consistent image um online when you're creating that most clients nowadays when they're looking for a new business a new service a new product the first thing they're doing is they're turning to Google they're turning to their search engines to find something in in the realm of what they're looking for and if you don't have an optimized website that's really quick easy to navigate showcases your brand in a very positive light you are missing out on potential leads and potential customers um it's it's a really strong touch point and a really solid foundation um to introduce your brand to your audience and really get people

to connect with and engage with you especially like for um you know we do a lot of Erp systems and when you're developing a very intricate system uh with lots of in and outs and trying to display information a certain way that's helpful for the organization uh design becomes a very important thing in the Aesthetics of it becomes very important too uh because like I said people need to be able to find that information with ease clear uh And So It Goes a little Beyond just looking pretty but you know uh generally sites that look pretty and clean uh tend to have that that already in place tends to be something that is very user friendly and tend to uh be very helpful for whoever is using that um that system so and just to tell much on what Pedro said there too you know it's it's it is it's more it's not just about sites looking pretty but it's also about creating a consistent brand image that's something in marketing that I push over and over again and can't be understated um the example

I give a lot of people who are new to the marketing world is you know when you look at a brand like Starbucks you can see their logo right away in absence of their name and you know that that's the Starbucks logo the Starbucks logo there is really good brand recognition and really good brand recall there they've spent a long time building that logo and it's become very easily recognizable to people who are interested in their brands um and and really to the world as a whole at this point you want the same thing for your brand right you want to pick consistent logos you want to pick consistent typography consistent colors when you're designing a website you want people to go on your website and within seconds know what you do and that it is your brand that's being represented and to do that you really have to make sure you have a consistent layout and consistent imagery as far as representing your brand online on your website and as well on social media yeah and then goes you know uh as

far as students like development wise and you're like using consistently the the libraries that you might use for charts or uh you know typography um you know images itself nowadays we're using a lot of like AI generated images uh so that we're not stepping to copyright issues and you know that has become very important as well um and just making sure that overall all these systems that our organization is using has like the same type of layout that can be you know easily identified because people are used to and you know training Wise It's very minimal because people are used to seeing things in a certain way and that follows that consistently so uh design is very important you know in all all aspects not only for uh you know the initial informational website but also like for all the systems that we develop and people use use no that's a good point um so you know we all know that websites are are not just viewed on our desktop computers we view our websites on our phones and then our

tablets um we here at triple helix refer to a website that flexibly adapts to a website based on the device that you're using is something called responsive design uh Pedro talk to our listeners about responsive design and how that's important and what we do to make sure that this websites we build are responsive so uh you know nowadays most people use websites on a mobile phone um obviously inside of a corporation they typically use um on a desktop but even then desktops you know they the size of the window can vary a lot depending on what type of display and resolution that they have so when you're designing a website more specifically when you're developing one you have to keep all those things in mind you know even going as far as like what type of browser organization might have it as default or might be using to make sure that the user experience is consistent across the entire organization and more importantly you know to the entire world or to the entire Corpus of people that are

potentially looking into that specific uh website or product so uh you know how do we go about doing that is you know having a mobile first uh mindset uh user first mindset and then you know with libraries like Teo wing for example there become very popular nowadays and you know we're certainly using uh across our projects uh that have you know that embedded in them um you know it makes it very easy to uh make websites responsive and user friendly in that manner so got it and you know we we all know that you know Google is the 900 pound gorilla in the world as far as you know finding the websites online so if your website is not indexed and optimized for for being found your company is never going to be found and um you know everyone says you you have to be um SEO optimized and um how important that is but how does one actually accomplish that um Lauren talk us through how do you achieve uh SEO optimization what are some of the the key points that we use to get found online absolutely

so as you mentioned Google is really the big name when it comes to search engines there's other search engines out there like Bing and I think there's GoGo Doc and some other search engines but there was a study done not long ago and most people are using Google when it comes to finding businesses on the web um so it's really important that you're making sure your website and even your social media and other other brand presence online is optimized in a way that you're getting picked up and found in search engines um so you know when it comes to things like copywriting I do a lot of copywriting for our company for our web pages for our social anywhere there's copy I work a lot on that and you know I see a lot of companies making the mistake of Outsourcing copywriting overseas or Outsourcing it to um some of these freelance agencies and I can't stress enough you really get what you pay for when it comes to copywriting there is so much to be said about solid well-written copy and it like

I've mentioned previously when I was discussing blog posts it's almost like an art form you really have to craft your copy in a way that it's persuasive it's compelling it resonates with your intended audience um and it gets you the results that you want so one of the first things that I look at when I'm crafting copy and I I think this goes for most marketing professionals is your demographic right who is your intended audience so many Brands and businesses are very quick to jump into getting a website up and running getting social media accounts up and running they don't take the time to really do competitor analysis and and Research into their industry and you know who their competitors are who their intended audience is knowing who you're marketing to is absolutely critical when it comes to things like crafting your copies selecting images for your website you want to think what is who is your intended audience and what is it that that person or those people would be searching for

and you want to make sure you're choosing copy and images that would resonate with with that audience so going through pages you know one by one I always tell people you know fine-tune um what you're looking at you know go with a fine-tooth comb over each page of your website individually and really make sure one page is optimized before moving on to the next it's very easy to become overwhelmed when you're looking at a website as a whole particularly if it has a lot of pages so just break it down go through the site literally piece by piece and then go through your SEO that way you know if you're building a site on applications like WordPress WordPress is really great plugins that you can use to check your SEO optimization as well as your readability so gauging content there's two factors that go into play that that will affect your rankings on Google readability and your SEO how well optimized is the copy that you have so you want it to be easy to read you want it to be grammatically

correct spelling corrects all the things that you would expect from good copy and you also want to make sure you're using relevant keywords um you know things that are are relevant to your audience into your brand so using plugins for WordPress like yoast are tools that can help you streamline that process us go through the copy that you write whether it's for a blog or it's for a landing page and really kind of pick out different elements that you can improve upon to boost that SEO and that readability in the copy that you're writing um as I mentioned earlier as well consistent relevant posting schedule um that cannot be stressed enough right so making sure you're posting to your blog or or updating your content on your web pages frequently and making sure that it's relevant for your brand really just making sure you're using all of those SEO best practices lots of keyword research optimized content you do all of those things you're setting yourself up for pretty good success right so

over time the length that you the length of time that your website's been up and running the length of time that you've been posting that relevant consistent content is all going to play into into account when it comes to boosting your credibility on search engines like Google you'll improve your visibility you'll boost your organic traffic and over time your ranking will increase um so that you guys are you know ideally on the first page of Google if not in the top five that's that's all very very good so you know I would be remiss if if we didn't actually talk about what we've actually been doing out there and so Pedro why don't you uh share with our listeners a story about some recent work we've done on the web um we at triple helix do do traditional website design and I would love to hear about a recent project that you've worked on and what that looked like yeah I mean uh there is uh one comes to mind um you know inspired a few actually but uh you know first and foremost our own website

um we are currently redesigning our entire website and we're keeping all those things in mind you know uh readability users um and we are essentially making sure that the information is properly displayed and their users can get to it um and we're kind of like giving a new feel a fresh look to our website in that sense uh there's also uh a lot of the a lot of the websites that we do uh they're purely informational um you know tend to be WordPress websites and you know they come usually those websites are have a very old design because they have a very outdated WordPress version and so it becomes very important to uh give them a new look even though they they might be using a newer version of Wordpress uh it kind of you know a lot of those companies kind of let go a little bit of their branding and so branding becomes the first thing that we work on uh you know establishing colors uh for the company making sure that uh we're following those you know according to maybe the logo uh giving

them the option to redesign their logo uh bring it more up-to-date to you know modern times uh a lot of companies they are very attached to their logos uh even though there might be an old looking logo and so uh and that's fine uh we can work with that but uh it's very important to you know bring those to the current times uh and then obviously just working throughout all the informational information on the website and making sure that um you know we tailor everything for the user experience uh you know have that as the center and not as much and not just having like the typical layout of a website kind of thinking through what the user wants to see and how it's best served the user that's navigating through the page and or seeing the information for the first time um and you know using high quality images and copies you know and so those things become all together very important and make sure the site is you know accessible by everyone no that's a very good point um so I think we're

kind of getting close to the end of our time for this podcast so I'd like to uh get some closing thoughts from both of you uh back to you Lauren with uh some final thoughts and feedback for our listeners yeah absolutely so one of the things that I feel like I've been stressing it over and over again um in this podcast is just consistency right so posting consistent content making sure your website is optimized and consistent consistently optimized across your various Pages um but also website design is ever changing right new trends are constantly emerging um the digital landscape is constantly changing so it's not you know you build a site you get it up and running and then you're done um I mean it's something that you constantly have to be checking in on constantly updating your copy updating your images making sure that it stays relevant because things do change um so just making sure you're prioritizing that constantly checking in um prioritizing like we talked about user experience

making sure it's responsive across multiple devices because the reality is a lot of people do view websites on mobile phones they view them on tablets and if your site isn't optimized across those devices you're missing out on that audience someone's going to go to a website they're going to get frustrated it's not loading properly the elements don't look right they can't read it and they're going to to bounce so making sure you know your site's responsive and optimized across those devices and really you know prioritizing seo seo cannot be emphasized enough making sure you have good SEO across your website as a whole on your individual Pages that's really going to bring you the results that you want to see over time right good point uh patreon yeah one takeaway from my side would probably be usability accessibility in you know making sure that you have when you're designing a new website or when you're you know updating your website it's something that you user-centered um so that you

know it's you know the information that is getting conveyed is actually being able to be seen in accessed by everyone no absolutely absolutely so um this has been our time today and I wanted to invite uh our listeners if you have any comments or questions to leave some feedback for us in the threads below um and if you have any questions for us or if you'd like us to have a look at your website and give you some ideas of how you can uh produce and create a new website we'd be very happy to work with you so uh thank you everyone my special thanks to my guest Pedro Lopez and uh Lauren Gully and we'll see you next time thanks everybody foreign