How do you evaluate website design for digital strategy?

1 Goals and objectives

The first step is to define your goals and objectives for your website. What do you want to achieve with your website? Who are you trying to reach? How do you measure your success? Your goals and objectives should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. They should also align with your overall digital strategy and support your brand identity and value proposition.

2 User experience

The next step is to assess how your website design affects the user experience (UX). UX is the overall impression and satisfaction that a user has when interacting with your website. It includes factors such as navigation, layout, content, speed, accessibility, and responsiveness. A good UX design should be intuitive, clear, consistent, and engaging. It should also match the user's needs, expectations, and preferences. You can use tools such as heatmaps, analytics, surveys, and user testing to evaluate your UX design and identify areas for improvement.

3 Conversion rate optimization

The third step is to optimize your website design for conversion rate (CRO). CRO is the process of increasing the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your website, such as signing up, buying, or contacting you. CRO involves testing and tweaking different elements of your website design, such as headlines, images, colors, buttons, forms, and copy, to see what works best for your audience and your goals. You can use tools such as A/B testing, multivariate testing, and landing page builders to conduct CRO experiments and measure their results.

4 SEO and content

The fourth step is to ensure that your website design supports your search engine optimization (SEO) and content strategy. SEO is the practice of improving your website's visibility and ranking on search engines, such as Google and Bing, for relevant keywords and phrases. Content strategy is the planning, creation, and management of your website's content, such as text, images, videos, and audio, to inform, educate, or persuade your audience. Your website design should be SEO-friendly and content-rich, meaning that it should follow the best practices for web standards, coding, speed, mobile-friendliness, security, and metadata, and that it should provide valuable, relevant, and engaging content for your audience and your goals.

5 Analytics and feedback

The final step is to monitor and evaluate your website design's performance and impact on your digital strategy. You should use analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to track and measure your website's key metrics, such as traffic, bounce rate, time on page, conversions, and revenue. You should also collect and analyze feedback from your users, such as reviews, ratings, comments, and suggestions, to understand their opinions, needs, and pain points. You should use the data and insights from analytics and feedback to identify what works and what doesn't, and to make data-driven decisions and improvements for your website design and digital strategy.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?