What to consider when designing a website

When designing a website, you're balancing user experience with business objectives, and that balance depends entirely on understanding who visits the site and what they need to accomplish. Start by clearly defining the conversion goal—whether that's a phone call, email signup, purchase, or form submission. Everything else flows from this. A portfolio site has different design priorities than an e-commerce store, which differs from a SaaS landing page. Before touching design software, map out the user journey from entry point to conversion. Where do visitors land? What information do they need at each stage? What objections might they have? This informs your information architecture and content hierarchy far more than aesthetic preferences ever will.

Technical performance directly impacts both user behavior and search rankings, so it can't be an afterthought. Page speed, mobile responsiveness, and core web vitals are now table stakes. Design decisions that look beautiful on desktop but tank on mobile waste everyone's time and money. Similarly, your HTML structure and semantic markup affect how search engines understand content—designers need to collaborate with developers to ensure heading hierarchies, alt text implementation, and schema markup happen during design, not as repairs later. Accessibility isn't optional either. Proper color contrast, keyboard navigation, and readable typography benefit users with disabilities and also improve usability for everyone, including people on slow connections or small screens.

Finally, consider the ongoing maintenance and scalability of what you're building. A design that requires custom code for every page change will frustrate clients and limit their ability to iterate. Designing within a modular system—reusable components for buttons, cards, forms, and sections—makes sites easier to maintain and update. This approach also keeps design files organized and lets future designers or developers understand the system quickly. Think about how your client will manage the site's content. If they can't easily add a testimonial, update pricing, or publish a blog post, they'll either hire you for every small change (creating friction) or abandon content management altogether (hurting SEO). The best design accounts for who will actually be using the backend and what tasks they'll need to accomplish regularly.