Designing the Perfect Website: User Experience and Beyond

Jason Bittner:
Hello everyone. I’m Jason Bittner from Triple Helix Corporation and welcome to our Helix Insider podcast, I’m joined in studio today with my developer, Pedro Lopes, and my Director of Marketing, Lauren Gulli. Hello everybody.

Jason Bittner:
So today we wanted to talk to you about the importance of having a good website. I think in this day and age, we’re all pretty familiar with how important it is, but these days there’s a lot more to websites than just simply having an online presence.

And we know here at Triple Helix that having a good website is a good indicator of how your company’s performing, how you look to the outside world. Having a fresh looking website that’s modern and up to date is important. You want to make sure that your audience and your customers are looking at you as a company that is progressive and actually modern.

So what I wanted to do today was talk to my team here about some of the things that represent good websites. And so Pedro, I want to start with you on what we call user experience or experience design. Talk to some of our listeners about what that means.

Pedro Lopes:
So essentially what it means is having a user have a positive experience when they’re visiting a website or a system, right? They want to be able to have usability, meaning they want to be able to navigate and find the things that they’re supposed to find, you know, get access to the information that someone’s trying to convey with the website.

It needs to be accessible by everybody, you know, people that have maybe disabilities or… don’t necessarily have certain types of access, common access to the website, and it needs to be user-centered.

So when people are developing a website, they need to keep the user first in mind in order to be able to develop something that they can properly use. It’s very important, if people have a positive interaction with your website, that’s basically like the first interaction that they have with your company. and having a positive experience kind of sets the stage for people to trust the brand, trust the company, trust the services that they provide.

Jason Bittner:
No, that’s a very good point. Um, now we know not only is the experience important, but the actual design itself and the aesthetics and how these, uh, newer sites are actually positioned so that they look polished and professional Lauren, you’ve spent quite a bit of time in this area.

I want to talk to our listeners about the design aesthetic and how important that is in a new and modern website.

Lauren Gulli:
Yeah, absolutely. Jason.

So I have seen our development team and others in the marketing industry work on a variety of different websites over the years. And you know, if you look at a website that was created, you know, many years ago versus a website that was created today, there’s a lot of noticeable differences. like Pedro was speaking to user experience, the way you lay a website out and design a website, the different elements you include, the different pages you include, all plays into that user experience.

So it’s really important that you create a modern site that’s easy for people to access, easy for people to navigate, and has different elements that really showcase your brand in a super positive light.

So things like embedding videos, such as this podcast or your brand’s podcast on pages in your website, so people can put a face to a brand, social feeds, embedding those into your site so you can see what’s going on… You know, maybe your Instagram feed if you have a lot of great content on Instagram or Facebook… really highlighting those elements on a website.

Having blogs. Blogs are something that is so understated but so incredibly important. Blogs are a long-term project. A lot of people think when they start doing blog posts that they’re going to see instantaneous results. The purpose of blogs is really to increase and boost your credibility over time, which in turn will help you to appear higher up in search engine rankings organically. So when you’re creating blogs, there’s an art form that goes into that, making sure that you’re including relevant keywords matter to your brand and to your industry without sounding like it was written by a machine or written completely by AI. You want to make sure you’re sounding natural, your tone is conversational, and you’re using keywords that really resonate with your intended audience. So having a really solid blog on your website is important and also posting constantly. I see a lot of websites where people might have a blog that appears as though they’re posting consistent content, but there’s no dates. It’s really hard to gauge how often content’s actually being posted. There’s kind of a general rule of thumb in marketing that until you get to about posts on your website, you should really be posting blogs at least once a month, if not more. We really like to try to post them once a week if we can, and that’s really what I encourage for new brands as well. As you boost credibility and your blogs become more prevalent, you can kind of space that out, but it’s really important to post consistent, relevant content that resonates with your audience.

So making sure your website’s optimized with those different tools to really just make sure you have solid branding and a consistent image online when you’re creating that. When they’re looking for a new business, a new service, a new product, the first thing they’re doing is they’re turning to Google. They’re turning to their search engines to find something in the realm of what they’re looking for. And if you don’t have an optimized website that’s really quick, easy to navigate, showcases your brand in a very positive light, you are missing out on potential leads and potential customers. It’s a really strong touch point and a really solid foundation to introduce your brand to your audience and really get people to connect with and engage with you.

Jason Bittner:
That’s a good point.

Pedro Lopes:
We do a lot of ERP systems and when you’re developing a very intricate system, we have lots of in and outs and trying to display information in a certain way that’s helpful for the organization. Design becomes a very important thing and the aesthetics of it becomes very important too. Because like I said, people need to be able to find that information with ease, it needs to be clear. And so it goes a little beyond just looking pretty. But generally, sites that look pretty clean tend to have that already in place, tend to be something that is very user friendly and tend to be very helpful for whoever is using that system. So.

Lauren Gulli:
And just to touch on what Pedro said there too, you know, it’s, it is, it’s more, it’s not just about sites looking pretty, but it’s also about creating a consistent brand image. That’s something in marketing that I pushed over and over again and can’t be understated. The example I give a lot of people who are new to the marketing world is, you know, when you look at a brand like Starbucks, you can see their logo right away in absence of their name. And you know that that’s the Starbucks logo. the Starbucks logo, there is really good brand recognition and really good brand recall there. They’ve spent a long time building that logo and it’s become very easily recognizable to people who are interested in their brand. And really to the world as a whole at this point, you want the same thing for your brand, right? You wanna pick. consistent logos, you wanna pick consistent typography, consistent colors when you’re designing a website, you want people to go on your website and within seconds know what you do and that it is your brand that’s being represented. And to do that, you really have to make sure you have a consistent layout and consistent imagery as far as representing your brand online on your website and as well on social media.

Pedro Lopes:
Yeah, and it goes, you know, as far as development-wise, into using consistently the libraries that you might use for charts or typography. Images itself, nowadays we’re using a lot of AI-generated images so that we’re not stepping into copyright issues, and that has become very important as well. And just making sure that overall all these systems that organization is using has like the same type of layouts that can be easily identified because people are used to and training wise it’s very minimal because people are used to seeing things in a certain way and that follows that consistently. So design is very important in all aspects, not only for the initial informational website, but also for all the systems that we develop and people use.

Jason Bittner:
You know, that’s a good point. So, you know, we all know that websites are not just viewed on our desktop computers, we view our websites on our phones and our tablets. We here at Triple Helix refer to a website that flexibly adapts to a website based on the device that you’re using is something called responsive design. Pedro, talk to our listeners about responsive design and how that’s important and what we do to make sure that this websites we build a responsive

Pedro Lopes:
So nowadays most people use websites on a mobile phone. Obviously inside of a corporation they typically use on a desktop, but even then desktops, the size of the window key vary a lot depending on the type of display and resolution that they have. So when you’re designing a website, more specifically when you’re developing one, you have to keep all those things in mind. Even going as far as like what type of browser organization might have it as default or might be using to make sure that the user experience is consistent across the entire organization and more importantly to the entire world or to the entire corpus of people that are potentially looking into that specific website or product. So how do we go about doing that? It’s having a mobile first mindset, user first mindset. And then with libraries like Tailwind, for example, they’ve become very popular nowadays and we’re certainly using across our projects that have that embedded in them. It makes it very easy to make websites responsive and user-friendly in that manner.

Jason Bittner:
Got it. And, you know, we, we all know that, you know, Google is the 900 pound gorilla in the world as far as, you know, finding the websites online. So if your website is not indexed and optimized for being found, your company is never going to be found. And, you know, everyone says you have to be SEO optimized and how important that is. But how does one actually accomplish that? Lauren, talk us through how do you achieve SEO optimization? And what are some of the. the key points that we use to get found online.

Lauren Gulli:
Absolutely. So as you mentioned, Google is really the big name when it comes to search engines. There’s other search engines out there like Bing, and I think there’s GoGoDoc and some other search engines. But there was a study done not long ago, and most people are using Google when it comes to finding businesses on the web. So it’s really important that you’re making sure your website and even your social media and other brand presence online is optimized in a way that you’re getting picked up and found in search engines. So, you know, when it comes to things like copywriting, I do a lot of copywriting for our company, for our web pages, for our social, anywhere there’s copy. I work a lot on that. And, you know, I see a lot of companies making the mistake of outsourcing copywriting overseas or outsourcing it to some of these freelance agencies. you pay for when it comes to copywriting. There is so much to be said about solid, well-written copy. And like I’ve mentioned previously when I was discussing blog posts, it’s almost like an art form. You really have to craft your copy in a way that it’s persuasive, it’s compelling, it resonates with your intended audience, and it gets you the results that you want. So one of the first things that I look at when I’m crafting copy, and I think this goes for most marketing professionals, is your demographic, right? Who is your intended audience? So many brands and businesses are very quick to jump into getting a website up and running, getting social media accounts up and running. They don’t take the time to really do competitor analysis and research into their industry and you know who their competitors are, who their intended audience is. Knowing who you’re marketing to is absolutely cool. critical when it comes to things like crafting your copy, selecting images for your website. You want to think who is your intended audience and what is it that person or those people would be searching for. And you want to make sure you’re choosing copy and images that would resonate with that audience. So going through pages one by one, I always tell people fine tune what you’re looking at. You know, go with a fine-tooth comb over each page of your website individually, and really make sure one page is optimized before moving on to the next. It’s very easy to become overwhelmed when you’re looking at a website as a whole, particularly if it has a lot of pages. So just break it down. Go through the site literally piece by piece, and go through your SEO that way. You know, if you’re building a site on applications like WordPress, WordPress has really great plugins that you can use to check your SEO optimization as well as your readability. So, gauging content, there’s two factors that go into play that will affect your rankings on Google. Readability and your SEO. How well optimized is the copy that you have? So you want it to be easy to read, you want it to be grammatically correct, spelling correct, all the things that you would expect from good copy. And you also want to make sure you’re using relevant keywords, things that are relevant to your audience and to your brand. So using plugins for WordPress like Yoast are tools that can help you streamline that process, go through the copy that you write, whether it’s for a blog or it’s for a landing page, and really kind of pick out different elements that you can improve upon to boost that SEO and that readability in the copy that you’re writing. as well, consistent, relevant posting schedule. That cannot be stressed enough, right? So making sure you’re posting to your blog or updating your content on your web pages frequently and making sure that it’s relevant for your brand. Really just making sure you’re using all of those SEO best practices, lots of keyword research, optimized content. You do all of those things, you’re setting yourself up for pretty good success, right? So over time, the length of time that your website’s been up and running, the length of time that you’ve been posting that relevant. consistent content is all going to play into account when it comes to boosting your credibility on search engines like Google. You’ll improve your visibility, you’ll boost your organic traffic, and over time your ranking will increase so that you guys are ideally on the first page of Google if not in the top five.

Jason Bittner:
That’s all very, very good. So, I would be remiss if we didn’t actually talk about what we’ve actually been doing out there. And so Pedro, why don’t you share with our listeners a story about some recent work we’ve done on the web. We at Triple Helix do traditional website design and I’d love to hear about a recent project that you’ve worked on and what that looked like.

Pedro Lopes:
Yeah, I mean, one comes to mind, you know, there’s quite a few actually, but first and foremost our own website. We are currently redesigning our entire website and we’re keeping all those things in mind, readability, users, and we are essentially making sure that the information is properly displayed and the users can get to it. And we’re… kind of like giving a new feel, a fresh look to our website in that sense. There is also, a lot of the websites that we do, they’re purely informational, tend to be WordPress websites. And they come, usually those websites have a very old design because they have a very outdated WordPress version. And so it becomes very important to give them a new look. even though they might be using a newer version of WordPress, it kind of, you know, a lot of those companies kind of let go a little bit of their branding. And so branding becomes the first thing that we work on, you know, establishing colors for the company, making sure that we’re following those, you know, according to maybe the logo, giving them the option to redesign their logo, bring it more up to date to, you know, modern times. A lot of companies they are very attached to their logos, even though they might be an old looking logo. And so, and that’s fine, we can work with that, but it’s very important to, you know, bring those to the current times. And then obviously just working throughout all the information on the website, and making sure that, you know, we tailor everything for the user experience, you know, have that as the center and not as, and not just having the typical layout of a website, kind of thinking through what the user wants to see and how it’s best served the user that’s navigating through the page and or seeing the information for the first time. And using high quality images and copies, and so those things become altogether very important and make sure the site is accessible by everyone.

Jason Bittner:
No, that’s a very good point. So I think we’re kind of getting close to the end of our time for this podcast. So I’d like to get some closing thoughts from both of you. Back to you, Lauren, with some final thoughts and feedback for our listeners.

Lauren Gulli:
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I feel like I’ve been stressing it over and over again, in this podcast is just consistency, right? So posting consistent content, making sure website is optimized and consistent, consistently optimized across your various pages. But also website design is ever changing, right? New trends are constantly emerging. The digital landscape is constantly changing. So it’s not, you know, you build a site, you get it up and running and then you’re done. I mean, it’s something that you constantly have to be checking in on, constantly updating your copy, updating your images, making sure that it stays relevant because things do change. So just making sure you’re prioritizing that. constantly checking in, prioritizing like we talked about, user experience, making sure it’s responsive across multiple devices, because the reality is a lot of people do view websites on mobile phones, they view them on tablets, and if your site isn’t optimized across those devices, you’re missing out on that audience. Someone’s gonna go to a website, they’re gonna get frustrated, it’s not loading properly, the elements don’t look right, they can’t read it, and they’re gonna bounce. So making sure you know your site’s responsive and. optimized across those devices and really prioritizing SEO. SEO cannot be emphasized enough. Making sure you have good SEO across your website as a whole, on your individual pages, that’s really gonna bring you the results that you wanna see over time.

Jason Bittner:
Right, good point. Pedro, final thoughts?

Pedro Lopes:
Yeah, one takeaway from my side would probably be usability, accessibility, and making sure that you have, when you’re designing a new website or when you’re updating your website, it’s something that’s user-centered, so that the information that’s getting conveyed is actually being able to be seen and accessed by everyone.

Jason Bittner:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So this has been our time today. And I wanted to invite our listeners, if you have any comments or questions, to leave some feedback for us in the threads below. And if you have any questions for us or if you’d like us to have a look at your website and give you some ideas of how you can produce and create a new website, we’d be very happy to work with you. So thank you, everyone. My special thanks to my guests, Pedro Lopes and Lauren Gulli. and we’ll see you next time. Thanks everybody.