Best Practices in Website Design - Tyson Bird
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The document outlines best practices for website design, emphasizing user experience, fast loading times, and effective SEO strategies. Key recommendations include using meaningful titles, organizing content with headings, and optimizing images. Additionally, it highlights the importance of internal links, backlinks, and mobile-first design to improve site visibility and accessibility.
Best Practices in Website Design - Tyson Bird
- 1. Tyson Bird • Jan. 15, 2025 Best Practices in Website Design GCD Boot Camp
- 2. About Me Currently: Digital Product Manager, Texas Highways Previously: Digital Product Strategist at Gannett • Grew digital audience from 150k -> 2m per year • Convert stories from print magazine to online • Develop travel planning tools like the Texas State Travel Guide and Texas Events Calendar • Work with other sta ff to support subscription, social media, and email marketing e ff orts
- 3. A (very brief) history of web design
- 6. Martini Asti Vitamin Water
- 14. Why??
- 17. Nielsen “Banner Blindness Revisited” Is the information at the top of your site providing users what they came for? For good reason, this is usually referred to as the CTA
- 18. CTA Best Practices Connect Users to Content • Make sure the page loads as quickly as possible (small images, not overloaded with content) • Include useful links of tasks you think your users need most • Navigation should be simple enough to help people fi nd what they need quickly
- 19. 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. BrightEdge
- 20. As important as your homepage is, good SEO is better
- 22. SEO Top Tips 6 Things to Remember • Keywords • Unique Titles • Heading Tags • Internal Links • Backlinks • Optimize Images Yoast plugin for WordPress
- 23. Keywords How users fi nd you • As much as possible, include relevant keywords near the beginning of your content • Use Google Trends to understand topics being searched for statewide • Avoid keyword ‘juicing’
- 24. Titles Page names matter • Titles appear verbatim in the search results, so think about what will cause people to click • Short titles like “More Information” won’t rank • Google’s suggested queries can be extremely helpful for writing titles
- 25. Headings Design, accessibility, and SEO • Headings break up copy on the page and helps the info be read by humans and computers • Always go in order, with H1 at the top and H6 near the end • Every modern CMS o ff ers a way to add headings, and most will transfer automatically from Word or other writing apps H1 H2 H3
- 27. Internal links Making connections • Include links whenever possible to past articles, additional information, or resources • Make sure the link has meaningful text, not just ‘Click Here’ • Double-check the page you’ve linked to is working
- 28. Backlinks Getting noticed • Harder to do than internal links —relying on other sites or partners to reference you • Consider creating ‘evergreen’ guides or resource pages to encourage links • Include site links in media releases • Link unto others as you would have them link to you ERCOT ERCOT X/Twitter
- 29. Images Think small • Smaller images help load time on all devices, which helps SEO scores • Use JPEG or WebP images whenever possible — PNG only for text or logos • Be sure to include alt text: descriptive text that helps SEO and assistive devices 1,000-1,500 pixels wide JPEG or WebP format 1mb fi le size maximum Resize before uploading
- 30. More current best practices in web design
- 34. Jot these down Tools of the trade Lighthouse Accessibility + Performance Available in Chrome Meta Sharing Debugger developers.facebook.com
- 35. Questions?