ADELAIDE WEB DESIGN + SEO + GRAPHIC DESIGN

Discover the principles of web design excellence: Blending creativity, user-centered design, responsive layouts, and visual hierarchy to captivate audiences, boost engagement, and drive conversions.

Web design needs to be creative to attract attention – but it also needs to be highly professional because people make snap decisions about the quality of your business.

It is often said that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing – but our Adelaide web designers love our clients to have some degree of knowledge when it comes to website development projects.

So we put together this extended FAQ that takes you through the basics of design theory and looks at some of the more complex – and sometimes competing – user experience principles that affect website design decisions.

These principles of excellence include:

• user-centered design approaches
• information architecture
• fundamental design principles
• visual composition techniques,
• theory
• typographic considerations
• responsive design and user experience
• interaction design
• adaptive layouts.

Understanding User-Centred Design

User-centered design requires the web designer to place the user at the heart of the design process. That means focusing – in advance – on their needs, preferences and behaviours. By understanding the target audience and designing with their perspective in mind, web designers can create layouts, graphics and navigation systems that provide an optimal user experience.

For example, most of the Adelaide website design community is aware of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are global standards set by the world governing body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Unfortunately, these principles are frequently ignored. And when it comes to designing a website, they are generalist principles for the greater good, not for specific audiences with special requirements .

To gain insights into user needs and behaviors, website designers often conduct user research. This can involve surveys, interviews and usability testing to gather data on how users interact with the website and identify areas for improvement. Personas, which are fictional representations of typical users, can also be created based on this research to help guide design decisions.

Another important tool in user-centered design is user journey mapping. This involves visualizing the steps a user takes to complete a task on the website, such as making a purchase or finding information. By mapping out these journeys, designers can identify pain points and opportunities to streamline the user experience.

Incorporating user-centered design principles can lead to websites that are not only visually appealing but also intuitive and easy to navigate. This can result in increased engagement, conversions, and customer satisfaction.

It was interesting to read recently that UK agency Synmek is emphasising “human emotion” in its web design projects. We would argue that Adelaide web designers have been doing that for well over a decade. But as a counterpoint, it’s important to understand that you need to connect with peoples’ hearts and minds. Both are important.

Information Architecture

Information architecture involves organising and structuring website content to support usability and findability. A well-designed information architecture enables users to easily navigate the site and locate the information they need. Website designers should carefully consider the site structure, navigation design, and content organisation to create an intuitive and user-friendly experience.

Site Structure

The site structure defines the overall organisation of the website’s pages and content. A clear and logical site structure helps users understand the scope of the website and find their way around. Common site structures include hierarchical, sequential, and matrix (or web) structures. The choice of structure depends on the nature and complexity of the website’s content. For example, an e-commerce site may use a hierarchical structure with categories and subcategories, while a portfolio site may employ a simple sequential structure.

Navigation Design

Navigation design focuses on creating intuitive and consistent navigation elements that allow users to move through the site effortlessly. The main navigation menu should be prominently placed and easily accessible from every page. Navigation labels should be clear, concise, and descriptive, accurately reflecting the content they lead to. Breadcrumb navigation can be used to show users their current location within the site hierarchy and provide easy access to higher-level pages. Responsive design techniques ensure that navigation remains usable across different devices and screen sizes.

Content Organisation

Effective content organisation involves grouping related information together and presenting it in a logical manner. Content should be divided into clear sections and subsections, with headings and subheadings that accurately describe the content within. Consistent labeling and formatting help users quickly scan and comprehend the information. Visual hierarchy, achieved through the use of typography, colour, and whitespace, guides users’ attention to the most important content. By prioritising and structuring content based on user needs and goals, website designers can create a more engaging and satisfying user experience.

Fundamental Design Principles

Fundamental design principles are essential for creating visually appealing and effective website layouts. These principles, rooted in Gestalt psychology, help guide the arrangement and the organisation of visual elements on a page.

Too often, we review websites that are simply pretty. And as digital content producer Jessica Stillman writes on the Inc website, many of these home pages are ‘a waste of money’.

Balance

Balance refers to the distribution of visual weight within a composition. A well-balanced layout creates a sense of stability and harmony. Symmetrical balance, where elements are evenly distributed on either side of an imaginary central axis, can convey a sense of formality and elegance. Asymmetrical balance, on the other hand, uses elements of varying sizes and positions to create a dynamic yet balanced composition. This approach is often used in modern web design to add visual interest and guide the user’s eye through the layout.

Contrast

Contrast is a powerful tool for drawing attention to specific elements and creating visual hierarchy. By using contrasting colours, sizes, shapes, or textures, designers can emphasise important content and guide users through the website. For example, a bold, colourful call-to-action button will stand out against a neutral background, encouraging users to take the desired action. However, it’s important to use contrast strategically and sparingly to avoid overwhelming the user or creating visual clutter.

Emphasis

Emphasis involves highlighting the most important elements of a design to ensure they receive the user’s attention. This can be achieved through various techniques, such as placing key elements in prominent positions, using larger or bolder typography, or incorporating eye-catching graphics. By establishing a clear visual hierarchy, designers can guide users to the most critical information or actions on a page.

Unity

Unity refers to the overall cohesiveness of a design. A unified layout feels like a single, integrated whole rather than a collection of disparate elements. To achieve unity, designers should use consistent colours, fonts, and styles throughout the website. Repeating visual motifs, such as shapes or patterns, can also help tie the design together. By creating a sense of unity, designers can make their websites feel more professional, trustworthy, and easy to navigate.

Principles of Visual Composition

Visual composition involves arranging elements in a way that is esthetically pleasing and effectively communicates the intended message. The rule of thirds, golden ratio, and visual balance are key principles that can guide website designers in creating compelling layouts.

The rule of thirds involves dividing a composition into nine equal parts using two horizontal and two vertical lines. Placing important elements along these lines or at their intersections creates a more balanced and engaging layout. This principle can be applied to the placement of text, images, and other graphics on a web page.

The golden ratio, approximately 1.618, has been used in art and architecture for centuries due to its esthetic appeal. In web design, the golden ratio can be employed to create harmonious proportions between elements such as the width of the main content area and the sidebar.

Visual balance is crucial for creating a stable and pleasing composition. Symmetrical balance occurs when elements are evenly distributed on either side of an axis, while asymmetrical balance involves arranging elements of varying sizes and weights to create equilibrium. Achieving visual balance in website design helps guide the user’s eye through the page and emphasises important content.

Visual Hierarchy and Layout

Visual hierarchy and layout are crucial aspects of website design that guide users through the content and enhance their overall experience. By employing Gestalt principles, grid systems, and effective use of white space, web designers can create visually appealing and user-friendly layouts.

Gestalt principles, such as proximity, similarity, and continuity, help organize visual elements and create a cohesive design. By grouping related elements together and establishing a clear hierarchy, designers can guide users’ attention to the most important information on the page.

Grid systems provide a structured framework for arranging content, ensuring consistency and balance throughout the website. A well-designed grid helps align elements, create visual harmony, and improve the overall readability of the page.

White space, or negative space, is an essential component of effective layout design. It allows the content to breathe, reduces visual clutter, and enhances the user experience. By strategically incorporating white space around text, images, and other design elements, designers can create a clean and uncluttered look that improves legibility and draws attention to key information.

By carefully considering visual hierarchy, grid systems, and white space, website designers can create layouts that are both esthetically pleasing and highly functional, ultimately providing a better user experience for visitors.

Creating Effective Visual Hierarchies

Size and scale play a crucial role in establishing visual hierarchy. Larger elements naturally draw more attention and are perceived as more important. By strategically varying the size of text, images, and other graphics, web designers can guide users’ focus to key content and calls-to-action. However, it’s essential to use size differences judiciously to maintain a balanced, uncluttered layout that supports the overall user experience.

Contrast in website design: Colour and contrast are powerful tools for creating visual hierarchy in web design. Bright, saturated colours tend to advance in the visual field, while muted tones recede. By applying contrasting colours to important elements like headlines, buttons, or links, designers can make them stand out and encourage interaction. Colour can also be used to group related items and create visual associations that aid navigation and comprehension.

Spacing and proximity help organize content into distinct, meaningful units. Related elements should be placed close together, while unrelated items should have more space between them. Adequate whitespace around text blocks and images improves legibility and reduces visual clutter. Consistent spacing between sections or content types creates a sense of rhythm and hierarchy, making the website design more intuitive and user-friendly.

Colour Theory and Typography

Colour psychology plays a crucial role in website design. Different colours evoke specific emotions and associations, influencing user experience. For instance, blue often conveys trustworthiness and professionalism, while red can signify excitement or urgency. Website designers must carefully consider colour schemes to align with the brand’s identity and the desired emotional response from users. Complementary colours, analogous colours, and triadic colour schemes are common techniques used to create visually appealing and harmonious layouts.

Font selection is another critical aspect of typography in web design. The choice of typeface can greatly impact the readability and overall esthetic of a website. Sans-serif fonts, such as Arial or Helvetica, are often preferred for body text due to their clean and modern appearance. Serif fonts, like Times New Roman or Georgia, are sometimes used for headlines or to convey a more traditional feel. It’s essential to choose fonts that are legible across various devices and screen sizes.

Text readability is paramount in website design. Designers must ensure that the text is easily readable by selecting appropriate font sizes, line spacing, and contrast between the text and background colours. Sufficient whitespace around text blocks enhances readability and prevents visual clutter. Responsive design techniques, such as fluid typography, can help maintain optimal readability across different devices by adjusting font sizes based on screen size.

By understanding colour psychology, font selection, and text readability principles, website designers can create visually appealing and user-friendly interfaces that effectively communicate the intended message and enhance the overall user experience. Applying these fundamental concepts of colour theory and typography is essential for creating successful and engaging websites.

Typography Best Practices

Font pairing is a crucial aspect of typography in website design. Combining complementary typefaces enhances readability and visual appeal. Sans-serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica are often used for body text, while serif fonts such as Georgia can be employed for headlines to create contrast. Designers should select font pairings that align with the brand identity and desired user experience.

Establishing a clear typographic hierarchy is essential for guiding users through the content. It can be simple website typography or complex – but the fundamentals remain the same. Varying font sizes, weights, and styles helps differentiate between headings, subheadings, and body text. Consistent use of typography throughout the website creates a cohesive and professional look. Designers should use typography to emphasise important information and create visual interest without overwhelming the user.

Readability is paramount in web design. Designers must ensure that text is easily readable across various devices and screen sizes by selecting appropriate font sizes, line spacing, and contrast between text and background colours. Sufficient white space around text blocks enhances legibility and prevents visual clutter. Responsive design techniques, such as fluid typography, can help maintain optimal readability by adjusting font sizes based on screen size.

By carefully considering font pairing, hierarchy and readability, website designers can create visually appealing and user-friendly interfaces that effectively communicate the intended message.

And if you’ve got the budget, you can even rent or buy your own special fonts to stand out from the crowd.

Responsive Design and User Experience

Responsive design is a crucial aspect of modern website design that ensures optimal user experience across various devices and screen sizes. By employing flexible layouts, fluid grids, and media queries, responsive design adapts the website’s layout to fit different screen resolutions seamlessly. This approach eliminates the need for separate mobile versions and provides a consistent user experience across desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

Mobile-First Approach

The mobile-first approach prioritises designing for mobile devices first and then progressively enhancing the layout for larger screens. By focusing on the essential content and functionality for mobile users, designers can create a streamlined and efficient user experience. This approach ensures that the website loads quickly on mobile devices and provides easy navigation and readability on smaller screens.

Accessibility

As mentioned previously, aesponsive design also plays a vital role in improving website accessibility. By ensuring that the website is usable across different devices and screen sizes, designers can cater to users with various needs and preferences. This includes considerations such as font sizes, colour contrast, and touch targets for users with visual impairments or motor difficulties.

Navigation Design

Effective navigation design is essential for a seamless user experience in responsive websites. Designers must consider how the navigation menu will adapt to different screen sizes and how users will interact with it on various devices. Common techniques include using hamburger menus, dropdown menus, or off-canvas navigation for smaller screens while providing a more extensive navigation menu for larger screens.

By prioritising responsive design and user experience, website designers can create engaging and intuitive websites that cater to the needs of a diverse user base. Your Adelaide website design company needs to be discussing with you such factors as mobile-first design, accessibility and navigation.

Interaction Design

Microinteractions are the small, functional details that enhance the user experience. They include elements like hover effects, loading animations, and subtle visual cues that provide feedback to the user. Effective microinteractions make a website feel more responsive and engaging. In fact, Sitepoint has it as one of its 10 trends in web design in 2024.

Feedback and affordances are crucial aspects of interaction design. Visual cues, such as buttons that change colour when hovered over or clicked, help users understand how to interact with the interface. Clear affordances, like a button that looks clickable, make the user experience more intuitive.

Accessibility is another important consideration in interaction design. Designers should ensure that the website is usable by people with disabilities, such as those who rely on screen readers or keyboard navigation. This includes providing alternative text for images, using clear and descriptive link text, and ensuring that the site can be navigated using only a keyboard.

By focusing on microinteractions, feedback and affordances, and accessibility, website designers can create engaging and inclusive user experiences that cater to a wide range of users. These principles contribute to a seamless and enjoyable interaction between the user and the website, ultimately enhancing the overall user experience.

Responsive and Adaptive Design

Fluid Grids

Fluid grids are a crucial component of responsive web design. They involve using relative units like percentages instead of fixed pixel sizes for layout elements. This allows the layout to adapt and resize smoothly based on the screen size, providing a consistent user experience across devices.

Breakpoints

Breakpoints are specific screen widths at which the layout adjusts to optimize the content for different devices. By defining breakpoints, designers can create distinct layouts for mobile phones, tablets, and desktop screens. Media queries in CSS are used to apply different styles at each breakpoint.

Flexible Images

Images play a significant role in web design, but they can pose challenges in responsive layouts. Flexible images are designed to scale proportionally within their container, ensuring they maintain their aspect ratio and don’t overflow. Techniques like using relative sizes and the max-width property help achieve flexible images.

Media Queries

Media queries are a powerful tool in responsive design. They allow designers to apply different CSS styles based on the characteristics of the device, such as screen width, height, orientation, and resolution. Media queries enable the creation of tailored layouts and styles for specific devices, enhancing the user experience.

Content prioritisation

In responsive design, content prioritisation becomes crucial. Designers must consider which content is most essential and prioritise its display on smaller screens. Less critical content can be hidden or collapsed on mobile devices to optimize the limited screen space. Techniques like progressive disclosure and accordion menus help manage content effectively.

By implementing these responsive and adaptive design principles, website designers can create layouts that seamlessly adapt to various screen sizes and devices. This approach ensures that users have a positive and consistent experience, regardless of how they access the website. Responsive design has become a standard practice in modern web development, as it caters to the growing diversity of devices used to browse the internet.

The final word

Knowing the theory of excellent website design is a step in the right direction – but it’s incredibly difficult to “tick all the boxes” when you are deep in a complex website development project, with stakeholders wanting to make ad hoc decisions.

That’s why it’s important for our Adelaide web development clients to have some knowledge, so that they can champion their own projects.

And when it comes to selecting who to work with, it’s the person, not the tools. You can have all of the best website design software in the world but if your web designers don’t know how to deploy it to achieve excellence, you might as well use something off the shelf.

Speak with an Adelaide web designer

Create a standout web design by combining creativity with professionalism. At Boylen, we craft custom sites that align with your brand, ensuring user-friendly management, mobile responsiveness, and seamless functionality.

Web design needs to be creative to attract attention – but it also needs to be highly professional because people make snap decisions about the quality of your business.

Yes, you can’t stand out from the crowd if you look like everyone else. But don’t be fooled into thinking that left-field design is good design or effective. That’s a classic mistake we see with younger designers and students just starting their creative journey.

Web design takes time

If you can spin up a new website in a few hours, it will use very clever tools – but it will be mass produced. That’s fine for low quality where web design aesthetics aren’t that important.

The same applies to graphic design, where the over-use of templates and clip-art style templates have become a race to the bottom.

But that’s not what we do.

When you work with Boylen, you get a design partner. We will work with you to understand what’s important to you… even if you struggle to articulate it.

Even if you don’t know where to start, we have the design experience to bring your ideas to life.

Skilled web designers

We provide you with the tools to easily manage your site. But unlike a low-level template that let your staff change “everything”, we work with you to lock certain elements so that your branding can’t be trashed. For example, let’s say you spend weeks or months developing the perfect web design with Boylen. A year later, someone new joins your team. They decide to change the colours, fonts and type sizes you have worked so hard to get right.

Is that what you want?

Of course, we can design your site to offer different levels of “permission”. So an owner or senior manager may have top tier access and be able to make major and alterations. (Even then, many businesses want us to hard code certain design elements so that even they can’t change certain critical elements).

Team members with lower levels of permission can use the in-built tools to easily add pages, resize images, move blocks around and so on

Design Inspiration Meet Practicality

Whether you want a simple site that’s easy to manage, or c complex site for your eCommerce business that has advanced functionality, with powerful marketing and SEO capabilities, we can craft a solution for you.

Naturally, the user experience on mobile phones and tablets needs to be first class.

Our web designers and quality testers work hard to ensure that your layouts render well on small and large screens.

Practicality also extends to areas such as advanced web applications and API integrations. We have both the design expertise and technical experience to ensure all of the functions you require – from bookings and memberships, to sales and online order tracking – are handled expertly.

Traits Of The Best Designers

Very few people are great designers.

The ability to bring together an entire website into a “cohesive whole” is learned over time. Our Adelaide-based senior designers are expert in helping you with the correct colour combinations (palettes), where to use animations to attract the eye, choosing the right fonts and developing a style guide.

The outcome? You get the triple benefits of a fully customisable web design, that solves your key issues (eg. more enquiries, automated sales etc) – and is also easy to manage.

As web creators, our qualified designers adept at creating appealing sites to suit most budgets (but we don’t do cut-price sites that are typically knocked together in unethical sweatshops offshore and then sold in Australia for under a $1,000.)

However, if you’re seeking quality and access to ongoing design advice, then Boylen might be a good fit for your organisation.

Web design for social media

Whether you prefer Instagram or Facebook, Twitter or another platform, Boylen’s web design team will guarantee they reflect your website design.

Or if you already have a strong social presence, we can develop concepts and mood boards for the website to reflect your socials.

Ready to take your marketing to the next level?

Achieve an integrated marketing strategy without breaking the bank. Boylen aligns your brand, design, and messaging across digital and print media: Helping SMEs compete effectively with creative, cost-efficient solutions.

Your logo and business identity, company messaging, product description and design are just some of the many parts that combine to create cohesive messaging to your target markets.

Whether it’s graphic design, web design and development, or high quality print material, everything needs to be part of an integrated strategy, rather than a series of ad hoc decisions.

Our creative team – graphic designers, UX specialists, web designers and project managers – have decades of experience in developing branding guidelines.

They understand that in today’s predominantly digital marketplace, consumers acquire information on products and services in many different ways. This diversity in consumer behaviour has created unique opportunities for small to medium enterprises to compete effectively with their larger competitors.

However, in bolstering their competitive position, SMEs are faced with two major challenges:

1. sustaining the integrity of their brand against relentless competition and pressure (often internal) to respond quickly and to be “flexible”, which is sometimes just another way of describing a knee-jerk reaction that isn’t thought through
2. understanding and being able to afford multi-faceted marketing practices.

Boylen’s creative studio will help you to build a competitive position across  new (electronic) and traditional (print) media, that combines agility with brand focus.

We achieve this by evaluating, with you, the most effective mix of of communications tools. The focus is to “get a plan”, leverage your strengths through creative design, and maximise cost effectiveness but avoiding “just in time design”.

However you choose to put your message out to attract and maintain customers, we make sure that each facet of your marketing practice is consistent and on-message.

And with our creative designers at your side, you don’t need an over-sized marketing department to be successful.

Free quote here

Blend web design with tech seamlessly at Boylen. Our creatives and tech experts collaborate under one roof, transforming strategy into stunning visuals that elevate brands and engage customers effectively.

Part of the “Boylen experience” is the chance to team up with our inspired creatives.

Our website design, branding and creative team sharing the same office space as our tech staff. Boylen’s web design experts talk the language of imagery, visual hierarchy and the importance of white space. Code is replaced by colour palettes.  Threads and tokens are trumped by typefaces and textures.

It is where strategy loses its hard edge and visual concepts emerge. 

So, do you need to stand out? To connect with customers? Breathe new life into a tired brand?

From inspirational home pages to ad campaigns and sales brochures, we have the experienced web design staff at hand. And we’d love to help!

Free quote here

Never lose sight of the fact that a website design project should be enjoyable.

We’re obviously biased because we choose to be web designers for a career. And while we know there’s a lot to think about for large and complex sites, don’t lose sight of the fact that this is a creative process. You’re allowed to have some creative fun to achieve an outstanding result.

Also remember that creativity is directly linked to business outcomes. It’s been proven countless times. Software leader Adobe found that approximately 60% of people will choose a beautifully designed website, over a dull site. Another often cited statistic is that 94% of users’ first impressions of your company – via your website – are design related.

One more stat: Goodfirms reports that four out of ten people will leave your site because of outdated design. 40% is not a chunk of customers that you want to turn away when better website development is so achievable.

The Blueprint For Complex Web Projects
The bigger your website and the more complex it is, the more important it is to break down the planning into distinct stages. For example, you can develop separate plans for:

• sitemap and navigation 
• content 
• imagery, including video, custom designed graphics and infographics
• search engine optimisation
• ecommerce requirements
• etc.

Another area worth its own segment is web design for small screens. In 2025, perfect web design for mobile phones will be even more important than ever before. So as you prepare for your next web design or redesign venture, have you thought about the critical elements that you need to include in your small screen composition? Think of the messages that are absolutely critical for your organisation and then work from there.

Like any business project, it’s best to have one easily accessible location to keep all of your assets. It may seem old fashioned but having a series of folders that are clearly labelled is the best way to go.

That way, everyone on your website design and development project understands where the files are and can identify them easily by the file name.

Make sure that all components are simple to transfer. There are many solutions on the market and you should discuss it with your web designer, who may be able to suggest the best solution based on their experience. At Boylen, we are very flexible, provided it’s secure. We’ve shared documents via Dropbox, Google and many other methods. 

Simple Website Construction
Of course, if you are just looking to build a simple website of three to five pages, there is no need to over-engineer the process. We’ve worked with clients who have drawn a simple sitemap and shown it to us. For a small site, that’s totally fine!

They’ve emailed us a few Word documents, their logo and a handful of photos they’ve had taken – and asked us to do the rest.  Sometimes we have clients that don’t have photos, so we either arrange an entry-level photo shoot or use stock images. The message here is that if you are time and resource poor, don’t let that stop you from moving forward. We can do all of the heavy listing for you. 

In our experience, the best thing you can do is jump on a phone call. There’s never an obligation and most design companies are happy to have a chat about what it is you’re trying to achieve and provide advice. You also get a chance to assess whether or not the designers are people you can work with.

Final Word
As a final piece of advice, the best course of action for many companies is to just get started!

We speak with too many companies that have continually found reasons to delay their website redevelopment because they are too busy elsewhere. Then, when they launch their site, they are left wondering why they didn’t glue a website redesign on their priority list so much sooner.

Further Reading

How targeted graphic design is a smart business strategy

Graphic design has many benefits

Yes, we have very strong expertise in WooCommerce and can talk you through not only the options available, but opportunities you may not have thought about.

Read our WooCommerce web design and development page to learn more.

Of course, adding Woo to your WordPress site is just the start of the process. You need to be found.

Here’s a great article on how to implement good WooCommerce SEO.

It’s a short list! Our graphic designers are experts in the Adobe software that is the backbone of the creative industry, namely:

• InDesign
• Illustrator
• Photoshop
• Acrobat

We also use apps to visualise colour and font choices. 

If you’re looking for advice, our graphic designers would encourage you not to forget the mighty pen/pencil and sketch pad.

It’s well accepted in design practice that different mediums inspire different thinking pathways. So we don’t just restrict ourselves to electronic design techniques, we often seek a quiet corner to draw and sketch and be inspired.

If you’re looking to invest in software to do design in-house, there are many articles comparing various software options. This graphic design software article is quite good.

A few words of caution, based on experience working with clients that have set up internal design studios – but then disbanded them. Designers are creative people. They thrive in creative environments. Can you offer that, so that you don’t have a revolving door of designers leaving to join a design agency?

Also, do you have the skills to be able to identify a great designer? If not, get your design business or agency to help make the assessment.

Choosing the correct font, its sizing and spacing, can make all the difference when engaging in typography centric web design.

Get it right and typography design flies! Nike is a famous example.

Some companies have the resources to develop their own, totally unique typeface. Standard Chartered teamed up with Lippincott and won a swag of gongs at the Transform Awards Asia, including “Best Use Of Typography”. The new brand identity also took out the “Grand Prix”.

Why go to this expense? Big brands make this investment because it helps them stand out in crowded markets.

But most web design doesn’t have the funds to work at that scale. That means relying on off the shelf type and working creative magic with it.  If you’re doing your own research, a few we suggest you look at include:

• Geometric sans serif fonts (in vogue, so there’s a ton of them to choose from)
• Cosmica
• Saol Standard
• Brixanos
• TT Rationalist

Web design and typography

Most of what you read online about type and website design relates to “text”. It’s concerned, primarily, with legibility.

But the potential of fonts bringing web design to life is unlimited – and incredibly powerful for brands.

Esteemed designer and design critic, Michael Bierut, once declared: “Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.”

What he is referring to, we believe, is the intersection where brand personality meets type in a perfect union. The person who is unaware of a company can ascertain the character of the organisation by the choice of their typeface alone.

By the way, he’s the designer that wrote the epic book of case studies with an equally epic title: “How to use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world.”

When our Adelaide designers ask new clients about their web design preferences, they often say they want a website that is “clean”, “fast loading” and “simple to navigate”. 

That correlates with a Google study that found that as design complexity increases, fewer people regard it as beautiful.

People also like a sense of surety when viewing websites.  

Google’s study reported: “Prototypical company websites lead to better first impressions than atypical company websites.”

That was a fundamental message in the best selling book “Don’t Make Me Think”. Within reason, most people want a repeatable experience. Research by Orbit Media backs this up. It analysed 50 top websites and found that “standard” website placed the company logo an the top left corner, had a horizontal navigation bar and a search bar in the header, and placed social icons at the bottom.

That doesn’t mean that a website should be cookie-cutter and bland. Far from it. 

The challenge for a designer is achieve design excellence, while working within certain norms. On the flip side, a poor user experience is poor design. The way we assess this it that people know that most sites will have the company name and logo in the top left corner. 

There’s a caveat in the study. Highly complex sites may be slower to load. People prefer fast loading sites, so they may actually be turned off complex sites because they are slow to load, as well as for aesthetic reasons.

Even great web designers aren’t perfect so it’s crucial to perform user testing. 

User roadblocks and frustrations that were not foreseen during planning and design can be identified and remedied. This is true for both web design and graphic design.

There is a tendency for organisations to bring in trusted friends and even family members to be the users that are tested. It’s understandable – but not ideal. They will have inherent biases based on their positive relationship with you.

It’s better to reach out to existing users that you don’t have a strong bond with. These might be new parents at a school, a recently acquired medical patient or even a customer that has been known to be highly critical in the past. (The latter may become your worst case scenario but don’t prejudge them.)

There’s no need to go overboard. You don’t need 100 people, you don’t even need 10! A seminal study by Jakob Nielsen found that just five people will show up about 85% of your UX issues. 

When should you test? The answer is probably “now”! Best practice advice is to test  as early as possible. You don’t want to proceed too far, only to find that there is a fundamental flaw early on in the process. Not catching it early will only compound the issue.

While it sounds difficult, it actually makes the entire process easier and you end up with a superior website design.

One caveat to this is that you shouldn’t rush. Before you begin testing users, be sure to establish your objectives. Be very specific. Make sure you only ask questions you need answered. Anything else is not core; it’s not essential. Focus, focus, focus!

When you interview children, you have to ask them open-ended questions (Not, ‘Do you feel happy or sad?’, but ‘How do you feel?’) The same applies in user testing. Don’t take the user down preconceived answer pathways. Keep the questions open and find out what they really think.

Record what they do so that other people on your team can see it. You need to listen to what they say but it’s even more important to watch what they do. Where they look on the screen, what they do, where they pause, what they click on … all these things are the critical factors.

Our Adelaide web design, development, SEO and support team is constantly monitoring all websites, whether they are WordPress, WebTemplate or even Shopify.

While this is done using automated tools, it requires in-house staff to monitor the data and respond to alerts.

Boylen’s monitoring service includes:

• Proactive WordPress monitoring with Application Performance
• Surface potential problems and optimisations that can help diagnose problems with a site’s user experience or improve site performance
• Uptime and functionality monitoring to ensure a site and its functions remain up
• Page performance reporting to increase page speed and conversions by executing page-level performance tests and providing actionable recommendations*

We are happy to put in place a monitoring SLA (this is usually for larger organisations).

If you have concerns about the performance of your current site, we can run a series of discreet tests to identify any issues. This is usually a low-cost exercise.

https://www.boylen.com.au/contact/Contact Us

No web presence is immune from being hacked. While we hear of the major companies being targeted – such as Crown Casinos, Latitude, Optus and Medicare – they hit the news because of their size. 

Every day, small websites and IT systems are being hacked. 30,000 globally. And often the intrusion goes undetected.

Recently we had a company come to us needing to upgrade their security. A hacker had built a new page on their website, which accepted payments. They weren’t sure how long it had been there. They didn’t know what else was happening in their code – and they didn’t know how to prevent it happening again.

It was quickly apparent that they hadn’t been updating their security patches and security upgrades.

They were also on a budget-priced hosting plan.

So, don’t think that you’re a small target that’s not worth the effort.

SME’s defences are under attack every day of the week.

Your web designer is probably not the best person to ask about this.

They usually lack the high-level knowledge.

At Boylen, our Support Desk is the first line of advice and assistance for our web design clients. They don’t have design talent (sorry guys!)  but they do know their way around code and hosting.

We have a specific page that deals with what a good security setup looks like, with some information on how it affects SEO. 

Yes. We also use it in conjunction with eye-tracking software so that you have several sources of data that you can look at before you leap into redesigning a website or specific landing page.

What you will typically take into account is the arrangement of elements on a page, the language you use, colours, fonts, images, pricing and so on.

You might also want to read this article from Hubspot.

Should my designer embed a social media feed into my website design?

More than half the world’s population is now on social media. It’s a great way to attract traffic to your website, especially new visitors.

On the other hand, embedding a social media feed on your website helps your website visitors keep up to date with what you are doing, without having to trawl through your various social media properties.

There are many ways you can design this feed. Your website designer can provide the best advice on the design that will best suit your branding. A few options include a gallery, a modular list or a carousel/slideshow.

Check out our blog in the subject.

Eye tracking software is an important resource that every web designer should have in their toolkit.

Eye tracking software can help you find out where people are looking, why they’re not clicking on certain areas of the page and which parts of the website are more appealing than others.

In other words, it helps you to understand how visitors are interacting with your website.  Your web design company will be able to point out where customers are faltering on their journey, and then make improvements.

You can also use eye tracking software to determine what content is working best for your audience. 

Common metrics include time spent on each page, time taken to view each part of the site, where people look first when they land on the site and where they click most often.

The latter point is critical data. Typically, you want people looking at and clicking on a call to action.

However, a competing element may be ‘stealing’ attention. Your website designer would then relocate the elements and test again, to see if the desired behaviour is achieved.

We worked with an international client that wanted people to see a validation they had received from a prestigious overseas organisation. It was a compelling point of difference. When we took on the project, we found that people were NOT looking at this element. Our web designer moved the graphic to the top of the page, above the fold, and then we ran the test again.

Success! Users were now taking notice of the major selling point for this company and click through rates improved.

Naturally you should take advantage of eye-tracking studies that have already been conducted. For example, we know that people scan web pages in a F-shaped pattern. For people from English-speaking countries, the left side of a page is read more than the right. 

After collecting data, you can analyse it and determine the biggest challenges facing your site, including things such as layout, colour scheme and user interface elements.

Then you can adjust your site accordingly so that it better meets visitor expectations.

Some companies set up test pages that closely resembles the design they plan to implement on their key pages. You can drive traffic to that specific page via digital advertising.

What you learn about visitor behaviour from the exercise will help you measure and predict how well that certain design elements will perform. 

Do you know what people are really looking at on your web pages?

Let’s work together to find out.

1. Get rid of your slider (carousel). The majority of people don’t read your second slide. They move down the page. So, alter your web page design to place your secondary messages below your home page hero banner.
2. Use colour selectively. Your designer should save your most prominent colour for call-to-action buttons. If you look at the often-cited Apple Store home page, all text in the opening screening is white or black – except for the clickable links for Buy and Learn More. These are in blue to attract attention. You will also notice that there are no colourful social media icons at the top of the page. The blue Twitter bird and Facebook F would compete for attention with the calls to action.
3. Review your key text. Does your main headline quickly tell a story or sell a key benefit – and contain the keyword you are targeting? Do your buttons and CTAs use bland text, such as Click Here? Or do sell a benefit, such as “Save 20%”? Do you have enough text to answer visitors’ questions but not too much that you clutter up the page design?

With all three of these design and content ideas, you should be able to make changes quickly with a good content management system.

However, sometimes you are too close to your website. That’s where a professional web designer can make a huge difference. 

WordPress is the equivalent of Microsoft Word – it’s the most used content management system (CMS) in the world today. It is used by the world’s largest companies, online shops and ambitious start-ups.

It is flexible, loaded with features and fully customisable. And because it is open source and supported by tens of thousands of developers around the globe, it continues to improve. (Its popularity also means you will always have an Adelaide  designer or developer that can makes changes to your website).

One on three websites is built on WordPress. Google gives it the tick of approval – and so does the Boylen team.

There are hundreds of thousands of web designers who use it as their primary tool of choice. Finding a web designer and developer to help with the ongoing support for your website is very easy.

WordPress has a raft of features, including:

Simple user experience


WordPress is very easy to use. With a little training and hand holding, anyone familiar with operating a web browser will feel confident in the driver’s seat. It doesn’t require any technical programming knowledge. Just point, click, type and publish.

Super search engine friendly

Google absolutely loves WordPress – in fact, they publicly recommend it. Well known Google staffer Matt Cutts once said: “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)”. Out of the box it comes standard with most things your website needs to get results. A few handy plugins will further extend your reach on Google search results pages.

Scalable

As your business grows, so can your website. From a simple five-page website right up to a 10,000-page site, WordPress doesn’t miss a beat. Companies such as CNN, General Electric and Time Magazine all have websites or blogs driven by WordPress.


Next Step

Would you like to know more? Give it a ‘test drive’? Click here and let’s find a time to talk.

A September 2022 study commissioned by CMS platform Wix posed the questions ‘What is good design, who gets to decide and what does the future hold?’

Be warned, you need to work through the naval gazing and “design wank” (that’s a technical term) to find substance.

For example, this is how one section of the report, Design Threads, reads:

“Oversaturated, under-stimulated, total meltdown. Navigating today’s abundance of information is the core of designers’ Catch 22: to find success almost guarantees you’ll be overworked, but take a beat and you risk becoming obsolete. Faced with peak overload, designers are looking in the mirror for answers, only to find that mirror is their phone: equipped with millions of options that make choosing one path forward feel impossible. Cue infinite brain melt.”

Sorry folks, it’s actually your report that gives us brain melt! So much great design depends on its simplicity.

That section of text could have said ‘society faces information overload, and designers have too many choices’.

Like the meercats in the insurance ads say: “Simples!”

The report could have been great. It tapped into people such as font guru Leandro Assis and brand identity leader Elizabeth Goodspeed.

Instead, it opted to be too clever, too tricky … and that’s bad design communication.

What are the foundations of good web design?

1. Accessibility – Your website should be easy to navigate and all of the content should be easily accessible. Web designers understand that no matter what device the user is using, they must be able to find what they’re looking for quickly. 
2. Design – The importance of visual design cannot be underestimated. Great website design should appeal to the preferences of your target demographics, complement your brand and convey trust. 
3. Usability – Make it a business goal that your new website must be easy to use and convert the curious into customers.
4. Functionality – Your new website should include the right features that are relevant to visitors and their goals. The web design will incorporate the right functionality in exactly the right place, be error-free and completely intuitive.Likewise, the functionality will move you closer to your business goals.

Marketing is highly visual. Harvard Business Review cites research that people are more likely to trust brands that have a custom web design. 

The general public will stay longer on visually appealing sites, which reduces your bounce rate and improves your chances of achieving a “conversion”. Combine this with responsive website design and you boost your search engine optimization.

Web design is more than just pretty pictures. It’s a combination of many different elements and principles that come together to create a fabulous user experience. Creating a unique user interface isn’t easy in a crowded market. If you want to avoid being another generic site and stand out in a good way, read on to discover all things UX related!

Foundations of Web Design

The foundation of any great web design is its structure – and the layout of your website is arguably the most important part of its design. A web developer might ask you to think of it like a building: there’s no point in having a fancy facade if your foundation is falling apart and about to collapse. That said, it’s also important to keep in mind how people interact with your site. Every website has two types of visitors: humans and search engines. Your website’s design should be intuitive for website visitors and help them navigate easily. There are a range of techniques that professional web designers use to achieve this.

Know Your Audience

The best web design starts with a solid understanding of your target audiences. Evidence-based web development must always consider your audience. Who is visiting your site? Why are they there? What do they want? 

Easy Websites for Users to Navigate

Navigation is a crucial element in best practice web design. You don’t want your users getting lost on your site like they’re in a labyrinth. Navigating your website should be easy and intuitive. A good web designer knows how to avoid leaving users feeling frustrated; that’s not a good experience. If you’re building a website from scratch, you have the opportunity to make great decisions when it comes to navigation. If you’re working with a pre-existing site, however, it can be a bit more challenging.

Why is User Experience (UX) Important?

If you want your website to be a success, you need to create a great user interface. How much time are you investing in UX? You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but you should have an idea of what makes a great UX before you start designing your site. UX isn’t an add-on feature of web design – it’s an essential part of the design process. Great usability will help people navigate your website more easily, understand your content more quickly, and even encourage them to stay longer.

If your website design is difficult to navigate or doesn’t work well on different devices, your hard-earned traffic is more likely to leave. If they don’t find what they’re looking for, they’re even more likely to leave. This is where an external web design service or digital marketing professional can assist. Sift through your Google Analytics with your website designer, UX design advisors and web development team to see where you can improve.

As an aside, people will often leave a site if it is too slow to load, so look at your website hosting on a regular basis.

How to Achieve UX With Art and Design

Aesthetics are an essential part of UX design. No matter how well-designed your website is, if it looks like it’s from the 90s, your visitors are less likely to stay. (The same is true of other digital designs, such as a Google Ad and social media design.) A good-looking site will inform your “guests” of your brand identity and help them understand your product or service.

It can even have the power to boost your sales. Good design has been proven to increase revenue.

However, web designers achieve great design by a variety of techniques; there is no one size fits all solution. Experience counts, as does natural talent and design flair. It’s also critical that creative staff in a web design company have guidance. You might be surprised how many don’t have a fully articulated web design process. (Boylen does – it comprises 19 steps and every client project is set up against it to ensure consistency of process and service.)

Don’t Forget About Mobile Users

A growing section of your target audience will ‘consume’ digital media via a smart phone. It is essential that your web design agency takes mobile users into account from the planning stage onward.

Good agency designers understand that mobile users typically don’t have a lot of screen real estate, so your passages needs to be short and sweet. If there is a content writer on your web development team, make sure they have strong input.

An ecommerce website needs special attention to ensure that the sales and payment process is optimised. This is where responsive web design meets interaction design – and you won’t get this if you opt for a basic template design. For ecommerce, your online presence is your livelihood and you need custom designs and a content management system that is easy to use so that you can update products quickly and easily to respond to your customers’ needs. Every ecommerce website design should include strong search engine optimization features.

If your mobile site is difficult to navigate or lacking in content, your users will likely find another site. If they’re visiting your site from a mobile device, they expect the same user experience as if they were visiting your site from a desktop computer.

Create A Responsive Layout

Using responsive website design allows your website to scale based on the device someone is using. This is where user interface design really comes into its own. A phone design experience is a minimal and extra steps and distractions are death!

A professional website will offer a phone user interface that is intuitive and easy to use. Think of big buttons that are easy to reach when a phone is held in one hand.

If you’re creating custom websites from scratch – as Boylen does – make sure you’re following responsive design principles.

The Importance of Visibility and Colour

A talented web designer understands that hierarchy of visibility is a key part of any design. Your layout, colours, fonts, and even your images play an important role in establishing this design hierarchy. It’s a skill – and a science – to understand what elements are your visitors likely to notice first? Remember, when it comes to web development, not everything can be the start of the page.

Most people notice the colour of your site before anything else. What colours are you using on your site? Do they mirror your logo design? Are the colours you’ve chosen visible enough? Can your traffic find the information they are looking for easily? Sometimes it’s a good idea to get a second opinion from someone with a graphic design background or from social media advertising, to gain a new perspective.

Your layout and colours can greatly impact how easily the public can find the information they’re looking for on your site.

If your digital marketing role means you manage multiple websites, a good web designer will take the time to understand any style that needs to be applied across all sites to reflect your parent company.
Likewise, a new website should not be seen as a clean canvas to go crazy. Unless you are a highly adventurous, ‘rule breaker’ style of company, resist the urge to go crazy with colour. Your users will thank you for it.

Instead, use colour to reinforce your company’s “look and feel” and to help guide people through your site, in thesame way a green exit signs guides people out of a dark room.

Beautiful Typography

Typography is an important part of any design, but it’s especially important in web design whether you are a large or small business or a non-profit. Your choice of fonts can have a real impact on your visitors and how they interact on your site. Your fonts can affect the mood of your site, draw attention to certain parts of your site, and even help transient web browsers navigate your site more easily.

Your fonts can also impact your search engine optimisation, especially if you’re planning on using a font that isn’t common. If you don’t want to risk hurting your SEO, you can always use a font generator to create a font from scratch. 

Graphic designers are often an excellent source of wisdom when it comes to fonts and their characteristics, even though website design is not their core skill.

Use Video Carefully

If you want to increase engagement on your site, video can help you accomplish that. Video is an engaging and useful content format for any type of business. However, you need to be careful when you’re incorporating video into your web design.

Work closely with your web designer to make sure you place it in an appropriate location and keep things simple. If you’re using video on your site, make sure it flows naturally with the rest of your content; don’t force it.

Video can both help or hinder your search engine marketing (and your social media marketing as well). 

Plugins allow you to select the best solution for each feature your website needs, while not being restricted on functionality. 

With WordPress, there are thousands of plugins available to solve all manner of requirements.

The Boylen team has worked with loads of plugins (we don’t count them). We have our favourites and we also know which ones are duds (don’t work consistently, have security flaws etc).

Rest assured that each plugin selected will be reviewed, tested and configured before being enabled on a live site.

If you are curious about using a particular plug in, just let us know and we can check out its functionality and give you our feedback.

Also, no matter whether you choose Boylen’s Adelaide website designers and developers or someone else, make sure that your digital design agency keeps a track of your plug-ins, updates them on a regular basis and shares the information with you.

We’ve inherited websites where the business or organisation had no idea what plug ins were on their site. Typically they are out of date and pose a security threat.

Want to talk plug ins? So do we! Chat with Web design agency in Adelaide.

High quality photos and videos are powerful sales tools.

Adelaide’s best web designers can create a beautiful website for you – but if we don’t have excellent imagery to work with, the advantage is lost.

We can help.

As you design or redesign your website, you have a range of options available to entice your potential customer, new patient, investor etc.

Here are a few:

Existing photos. Let us look at them all. We might see something you don’t. It’s amazing how cropping and zooming can elevate an ordinary image.

Engage a professional photographer. We can recommend Adelaide website photographers who understand how their images will be used. (Note: some photographers are great at taking product shots but not so good with people, while others can bring a fairly dull building to life – for example, by shooting at night with lights on, hosing down the street front to get a night-time rain effect etc).

Engage a pro videographer who specialises in website work. Ideas include drone shots – inside and out, at dawn as the sun rises over your premises or perhaps a one-on-one interview (our professional interviewers can handle that for you).

Stock photos. Warning: website designers will tell there is a lot of rubbish in the market. And they’re correct! Some of it is not much better than clip art. That’s why we continually research the market and get access to high-end royalty-free, stock photo and stock video sites that not a lot of people use. Our focus is on quality and originality. You don’t want to use the same photos that everyone else does; that’s a recipe for a bland website design.

Supplier pics and videos. If you stock Nike gear, it makes sense to use some of their product shots and slick videography.

Take your own photos. This rarely works well but if you are on a budget, talk with us so we can recommend the best settings, dimensions, angles and ideas. If you are an avid photographer with a SLR camera, so much the better. As a final tip, take lots of photos with a wide range of angles and at different times of day. From a large selection, our Adelaide web designers can choose a few hero shots to maximise your visual message.

NOTE: We’ve had client sent us a batch of professional images they had commissioned. They should have been fun – to reflect the “people” sector they operate in. But they had been photographed as if they were a high quality product or widgets for a catalogue.

Sure, they were beautiful but where were the people? This is a mistake we see all too often. Make sure you take a variety of versions of the same photo – some with people, some without, maybe from an angle, maybe with a special effect lens. Give yurself choice. Give your website designer options. Shake it up! Get creative!

We offer website development, design and SEO services for single person start-ups right through to organisations with thousands of employees that sell a range of products in over 150 countries.

And everything in between.

It’s a real privilege to be part of so many growth stories, to understand the values that drive successful organisations and to optimise your web design.

We undertake custom web design for Adelaide companies, firms in Sydney and Melbourne, and we work with a wide range of international branch (export) offices.

In fact, the use of the term” web design” is limiting. We develop everything from a simple form and entry level SEO right up to the automation of complex workflows, integration of websites with back office software and undertake international SEO (which is nothing like local SEO). It’s a full website development service.

Over 30 years, we have worked for most sectors, across private enterprise and more than 20 government departments (including the SA Premier’s Department).

• Schools and colleges
• Dentists, medical and allied health
• Manufacturing
• Export
• Hotels and hospitality
• Associations
• Defence
• Automotive
• Law firms
• Retail
• Tourism

That’s our short list. Unless you are the next Bill Gates with a revolutionary new product, there’s a good chance we have experience in your sector.

Please use this link if you would like to discuss your next digital design and marketing project. If nothing else, check out our basis 404 page!

A search engine uses complex algorithms to detect content and decide where it fits within the billions of web pages it has in its index.

The words you choose are important. They signal the intent of your web pages. It is no different to a conversation between two humans. You listen to the other person’s words, their tone and patterns in their speech in order to decipher what the other person is trying to say to you.

A young child has low communications skills, while a university English professor has very sophisticated skills. The search engines sit somewhere in the middle; they are, after all, a combination of coding and machine learning. They are not smarter than a human, although when it comes to sorting information at this level, it would require a nation of people to achieve what the Google bots do!

Example

Let’s use the example of Boylen to see how this works. Clearly one of the services we offer is “web design Adelaide”.  That is known as a keyword.

We want the indexing bots – or spiders – to understand that we offer this service.

One line on a page isn’t enough. Think of it this way. If you blurt out a solitary sentence to a visitor to your store or place of business, they will think it is rude. They will also fail to achieve anything but the shallowest of comprehension.

If you are going to sell yourself, you need to provide more information. Some people prefer to think of it as “data”.

In our example, we let people know that we have an Adelaide website designer that can meet their needs. This person – a team, actually – is professionally trained in their specialist field and they are incredibly creative.

Whether you are looking for a new logo or some initial proofs for a potential landing page, the people we have to help you are website creators – and Adelaide is their location, which is important. Local Search is part of the core of Google because people are usually looking for a service provider in their close geographic area.

Can you see what we’re doing here? It’s semantic variations on a theme. Another variation would be “Web design Adelaide”. It is such a small change but you need to understand that you are writing not for yourself, but for the legions of people who might potentially be interested in doing business with you.

The way a lawyer searches is different to the way the head of marketing enters their lookup queries, and the communications specialist in a high school will think – and type – differently to those two. A B2B search is different to B2C and so on.

It can be daunting trying to figure out how to construct content with the actual phrases that people are using in the real world. That’s why there are many tools you can use to find out – on a scientific basis – the answer to this, rather than relying on instinct.

Prioritise to Match Intent

So back to the Boylen case in question, do we opt for a term such as “Web development Adelaide” or “Adelaide web development”? Great question, we’re glad you asked!

The answer lies in the data, in the statistics that are gathered by the likes of Google Ads and a host of other commercial providers.

What we can tell you is that you should generally put your most important word first. The bots can tell where you are located, so is that more important than the service itself? Probably not.

Therefore, frame your wording in such as way that the critical aspects come first. This applies to your entire content strategy.  Think of it as a pyramid. The most important, singularly critical thing – it might be “website design Adelaide” – is the point of the pyramid.

As you go down, there’s increasingly more space and scope to add more details. If you develop your copy in this manner, a person who stops reading after one line will still have a rudimentary idea of what it is that you do.

That, too, is essential because most people don’t read past the headline on your web pages. It’s like that old joke: “What’s the best place to hide a dead body?” The answer: “On page two of Google because nobody every goes there.”

In reality, not many people read all the way through your text unless they are really interested.

Satisfy User Intent

That last point is all about “intent”. Why has a person visited your web page? Clearly they are trying to satisfy a need. That may be information – such as finding out ‘who is Adelaide’s best web designer’ – or it may be a product they want to supercharge their broadband, satisfy their hunger or play an online game.

So they search and if there is a local option, that gets a better showing, at least in the maps category which sits near the top of the page. That’s great! That’s where you want to be. So being (a) an Adelaide website and (b) offering well written and carefully structured content, as well as (c) good reviews, will put you in contention to be listed with one or two others. (Those are your competitors. If you are not listed, have a look at what they are doing. Or ask a professional to explain what you need to do to bridge the gap. That’s one of the things we can help you with.)

In our case study, Adelaide websites have a geographic advantage over those that exist in, say New York, which are unlikely to be helpful for someone in urgent need of a dental practice or the best education websites.

Design A Blog For Your Business

Your blog is another important element in marketing your organisation, whether it is a small business, a corporation or a non-profit. Digital marketing agencies in Adelaide – notice we put that geographic identifier at the end of the phrase – will probably have a broad ranging blog. It will contain topics such as a graphic designers blog, a subcategory or a standalone blog on web design, a general section etc.

Why would you do this? Why would you have a creative blog? The answer is that it’s a way to provide ongoing information in an area of your website where people expect to be able to find new and relevant advice that suits the sector you operate in.

What you say on your services page may not change from year to year. Likewise, your About Us page might stay the same because you have a successful model and you are busy satisfying your clients, your patients, customers … whatever is the appropriate term for your target audience.

This is evergreen content. To be continually changing it would not be authentic. Once you’ve perfected it, why would you change it just for the sake of change? It would actually devalue the user experience.

So that’s why we have a blog that serves the Adelaide web development community – specifically, those who are seeking the service of an Adelaide web designer or a graphic designer in Adelaide.

So that’s why we have a blog that serves the Adelaide web development community – specifically, those who are seeking the service of an Adelaide web designer or a graphic designer in Adelaide.

It is the place our clients – and other curious visitors – can come back to stay up with trends, challenges, changes to CMS upgrades, website security alerts, clever design hacks, discussion about creative elements such as fonts and colour, as well as technical matters such as page speed and how your code or image files might be hindering load times.

It’s market intelligence and also instructional but it can be much more than that. Be open to new ideas. Look at what other people are doing.

You may be one of the many companies in South Australia that is struggling with a skills shortage. You can use you blog to show potential employees what sort of culture you have. Do you socialise together? Support charities? Win awards for the best website design in Adelaide?

In our case, a designers blog allows us to communicate with our key demographic, which is people who need to market themselves in both digital and traditional formats. It lets people judge what we say and whether we demonstrate thought leadership. They can then jump across to our Portoflio section to judge us on the quality of our work. This section has many names, depending on your industry. However, the key thing about a projects page is that it fulfils the need of visitors, which is to judge you not on what you say but on what you have done.

They can then jump across to our Portoflio section to judge us on the quality of our work. This section has many names, depending on your industry. However, the key thing about a projects page is that it fulfils the need of visitors, which is to judge you not on what you say but on what you have done.

The websites Adelaide companies will be shown in search results are often Adelaide companies. Perfect! If you keep updating your portfolio and your blog pages, you are keeping your site fresh.

If you don’t do this – or if you start and then stop – it can be worse than not having anything at all. This is because people tend to have a “recency bias”. If your projects are all several years old, they may decide you haven’t done anything worthwhile for ages and are on the way down.

If your articles or blogs are sporadic, it reflects on your operational discipline. It also projects an image of a company that doesn’t care.

And as we have already said, it’s not going to do you any favours when you are being judged by the likes of Bing, Yahoo and Google.

Summary

So in conclusion, what are the key points?

The main message is that semantics are your friend. Use a tool that shows you what word combinations are the favoured terms used by your audiences and then get to work to produce prose that covers all bases.

Thank you for reading to the end. Clearly you can see what we are doing with this article. If you would like us to help you with a similar strategy, we have the professional staff to deliver.

Unlike others, we never outsource this overseas. It’s important that your page vocabulary is clearly written by someone with English as their first language and who resides in Australia. Why? Because people can see through outsourced content. Nuances and cultural norms can’t be taught and must be learned through life experience.

Another promise is that we won’t spin up words using AI technology. We’ve tested a swag of them and while it’s impressive what the best of them can do, they still fail to provide depth. They are great for a paragraph or two but even those are really just slightly altered copies of what already exists on other websites (probably your rivals).

Any AI text of a decent length will probably fail the credibility test. One test we ran gave us a result that kept referring to a woman as “he”.

So that’s why our writers are humans. They live in South Australia. Just like an Adelaide web page designer, our writers you can sit down with you or join you on a tour of your business. In that way, they provide you with the headlines, words, captions and product descriptions that will bring your offering to life.

If you would like to talk, we would too. We’re passionate about all things digital and we don’t employ sales staff. You’ll talk to a project manager, an Adelaide web creative, SEO expert or someone else who will actually be hands-on with your project.

Are you an Adelaide business looking to get ahead? Talk to a website specialist or graphic designer. 

The steps required in a web development project depend on the size and complexity of the website.

An enterprise level website will have extra focus on research, discussions and testing in the early stages before web designers and web developers get involved.

A simple site may skip those stages altogether and move straight to preparing a design brief.

Here’s an overview of what to expect. We add and take away services depending on your needs, your website design budget and your timeframes.

1. Agree all project details – specifications, pricing, etc
2. Establish project management systems
3. Agree deadlines and key milestones
4. Creation of a shared portal online where all team members can keep key documents and communicate. The system keeps all of the correspondence so that it’s possible to check back on earlier decisions, to do lists etc.
5. Agree site architecture and UX, with wireframes
6. Agree content plan, including:
   1. Content writing and editing
   2. Images: existing, organise photoshoots and video.
   3. Image enhancement (eg. adding text to an image and styling it properly)
7. Develop design brief
8. Home page design and revisions until satisfied
9. Internal web page template designs and revisions until satisfied
10. Website development and coding, animations (movement), forms, automation, integration of third-party software etc
11. Set up elements required for eCommerce
12. CMS training
13. Content population – either by Boylen, the client or a combination of both
14. SEO includes:
    1. Title tags
    2. Meta descriptions
    3. Best practices for content
    4. XML sitemaps
    5. Schema
    6. Canonicalization
    7. Goolge Search Console
    8. Google Analytics 4
    9. Rich snippets
    10. Google My Business
15. Quality assurance testing and rework
16. Client testing and changes
17. Handover of online training manual specific to the individual website
18. Set up web hosting, SSL certificates etc
19. Go live
20. Warranty period
21. Website maintenance
22. Project review
23. Continuous improvement, software patches and upgrades
24. Ongoing digital marketing

Boylen: Adelaide Web Designers

Our Adelaide web design & development studio is available to meet and discuss your plans. Or we can come to you.

Catch up on an initial phone call or have a Zoom/Teams meeting. Just let us know what suits you.

Technology advances have accelerated the development time required to create a website.

From talking with other Adelaide web design & development businesses, we’ve worked out that the average website design and build in South Australia is between four to twelve weeks.

A sub-standard job will get you something dished up in two weeks. (Tell-tale signs include fuzzy logos, images that haven’t been optimised and hurt your SEO without you knowing it, no clear user journey (to get users to click, buy etc) and security issues. Big security issues because they used old software that hackers exploit! (Sorry about the rant.)

So, a well planned and executed site that includes several stages of custom design and quality assurance testing might take two months.

That also allows some slippage for you to get all of your content together.

Enterprise level websites may take up to a year if they include multiple stakeholders and an elevated level of complexity, including development of apps and automation, translations and a high degree of automation.

We checked in with our web design friends in the USA and they believe that this time range is fairly standard around the world, with the exception of around-the-clock sweatshops in the sub-continent.

What do website design projects take so long – or fail to meet deadlines? The number one culprit is content. When clients don’t have their text, images and videos ready, it invariable slows down a web design project. If you do have all of this prepared, it’s amazing how fast our web developers can get things done.

That’s one of the reasons we put content discussions at the start of the project, rather than waiting until the final phases after the web design and development have been completed. It’s also why we have content creation services on hand to help you when your normal workload gets too hectic, even without your new website project.

Giving an important project the time it deserves also means you can optimise the technical SEO fundamentals.

Note: we have done sites a lot faster. These are usually for existing clients with a sudden urgent need (CEO to marketing manager: “Oh, by the way, we’ll need a new website for that new product launch in a fortnight’s time.”) And we do love a drop dead deadline for an event. But for most websites, a calm and orderly process where we all respect deadlines and communicate clearly leads to a superior outcome.

Click this link now if you would like us to develop a timeline for your next website design and web development project.