All posts in Website Design Practices

You launched your new e-commerce website and you’re excited about the promise of increased business.

You sit back and wait for the traffic to roll in. And then you wait some more.

After a few coffees, you realize it’s not catching on the way you expected. But why?

It’s very possible that it isn’t what you’re selling that’s the problem. You likely have a web development issue, that can be fixed.

Let’s take a look at common web development issues that hold businesses back and how to reverse them.

1. You Lack a Value Proposition

When it comes to content, what you present to website visitors is very important. While it’s okay to tell people your brand philosophy and some of your achievements (like many companies do), you have to make it relevant for potential customers.
That means you should take the time to develop a value proposition. There needs to be a focus on the products or services you’re offering – you tell the potential customer how these offerings can solve a problem that they have.

Think about what sets your products apart from your competitors, and then hammer that home in your website messaging. Tell them how you can better serve them or more affordably meet their needs.

2. You Don’t Know Who Your Audience Is

You could have heavy website traffic, but that doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t generate any sales leads from them.
This step of creating quality leads, not just website traffic, should actually start before the website is even built. Questions you should ask yourself include;

Read more: Web Development Issues: 7 Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t Driving Business

Early in the life of your startup, perhaps when that venture is still just a side project, you need to get serious about the design of your website or app(s). And you can expect that task to be a financial drain. Building a great interface isn’t all that different from building a house: It has to be done by a great designer or coders; and those professionals’ labor doesn’t come cheap.

However, there are ways you can reduce costs and the amount of time that designer or coder spends on your project. Here are the typical stages of a web-development project and how you can reduce costs at each step.

The web-design cycle
For those of you less familiar with web development, there is usually a set system for how new pages and features get designed and built. While this might vary from place to place, most larger businesses will have some variation on the following stages for building and improving web properties and apps.

Initial wireframes or mock-ups
First, there is a pre-design phase where any new ideas are mapped out, usually as a “wireframe” or “mock-up” (there is a difference). Those ideas might be for a new web page, a new feature in an app or some other element which might change the overall aesthetics or functions of your web property.

The design of a whole new site or app can be a large undertaking requiring many mock-ups and meetings, but a single page change will often be something an individual can build a wireframe for. This rough sketch of the proposed site can be shown to colleagues at meetings as well as to the company’s go-to or in-house designer. It can be discussed and reworked until everyone is happy.

The design at this point will only be rudimentary and will show where certain features are and where large images might go, and give some indication to the designer of how the overall page/feature should look.

Read more: A Quick Primer on Managing Your Web-Development Tasks

Few technological developments have garnered as much media attention as AI, and for good reason: Few nascent technologies have disrupted as many industries and commanded as much consumer attention as AI has. Despite the fact that AI is drastically upending many predictions about what the future of business looks like, however, too little attention is being paid to the way that it’s radically reshaping web development as we know it.

Savvy web developers around the world are already rushing to embrace the power of AI. Here’s how AI and the offshoot innovations it’s enabling are reshaping web development and giving developers everywhere hope about the future of tech.

A new kind of user experience

The biggest way that AI is reshaping web development is by offering users everywhere a new, more personalized experience unlike anything they’ve ever enjoyed before. Talented developers have understood for years now that in order to consistently lure new users in, you need to engage them and provide them with enticing, interactive web design that reacts to their choices. Now, with a helping hand from some AI companions, developers everywhere are realizing that they can cultivate a new kind of user experience that exploits the power of machine learning (ML) to dynamically adapt more quickly than ever before.

We aren’t quite yet at the point where we can delegate everything to the machines, but anybody involved in web development over the past few years can tell you that ML is rapidly breaking onto the scene and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. The exciting promise of ML as it pertains to web design will only grow in the near-future, too, especially as investment dollars continue to flood in from around the world. Eager investors everywhere understand that AI knows no limits and can be leveraged by businesses anywhere regardless of their size.

Read more: How AI is reshaping web development

A technology or framework doesn’t have to be brand new to be on our list here, it just needs to be growing rapidly or evolving in an interesting way. Let’s take a look!

LOOKING BACK ON 2018: SPA,  CSS GRID, AND SPEED

Single Page Applications (SPAs) saw a leap in popularity in 2018. A simple concept made possible by the power of modern Javascript, a SPA loads a page once then never reloads it or navigates to another page; instead, Javascript is used to manipulate the DOM and render new layouts in the browser. JSON data can be sent between the client and server, but the page behaves more like a desktop application than a “conventional” website. (Visit the websites of Gmail, Facebook, Apple and many more to see a SPA in action). It can provide a much snappier experience to the user and really transform the responsiveness of a site, but usually requires a sizeable chunk of code shipped to the browser. It’s an idea that’s been popular for a while but really saw a lot of developer engagement last year.

Read more: WEB DEVELOPMENT: WHAT’S BIG IN 2019?