London

The first impression potential customers often have of a business is its website in this digital-first world. Very good web design at Ellenom includes many things; we feel it is about digital experiences that function well, are easy to use, turn visitors into customers, and portray your brand accurately on the web.

From a business website, old design renovations, to a totally complex e-commerce platform, our different web design services are catered to the custom requirements and goals for all web offerings.

Let us go with the essential elements of successful web design and how our approaches will make sure your online presence stands out against competitors.

Understanding Web Design Beyond Just Looks

Web design governs the look, feel, functionality, and all user experience aspects of the site. Striking a fine balance between aesthetics and utility determines whether a visitor will stay to peruse, let alone engage in conversion.

While we take a holistic view of web design at Ellenom, we also consider every little aspect that can affect your site performance:

• Visual Design: generating a book on-brand presentation
• User Experience (UX): being able to navigate the site easily and find what one needs
• Website Structure: arranging content in a logical and intuitive way
• Responsive Design: your site looks and works great on any device
• Performance Optimization: Construction of fast pages to keep a visitor engaged
• SEO Integration: making sure that your site ranks in search ways

So not only does a good website look attractive; it works great too. Gone are the days of fancy-looking designs, yet slow loaders. Today, visitors expect a site that loads quickly, works on any device, and facilitates easy finding of information or completing tasks.

Research states that 88% of online consumers will not return to a website after a bad experience, which underpins why professional web design is not a luxury but an expectation for businesses that want to succeed online.

Our team of designers, developers, user experience, and digital marketing specialists work together to build websites that not only look impressive but also deliver concrete results for your business.

The Design Phase: Setting the Stage for Success

From this stage, your site moves from conceptualization to a visual reality. We at Ellenom tread the important design step carefully, aiming to realize your vision and include industry best practices.

First, we do our homework, researching your industry, competitors, target audience, and brand equity. All research done moves the strategic decisions about the design flow. For that reason, your site will be beautiful and designed accordingly for your targeted audience with your world view and business goals in mind.

Next is wireframing: simple layouts that map out the structure of the main pages without colors, images, or typographic distractions. This way, we focus on the user flows and information architecture that will make your site intuitive and user-friendly.

After approval of wireframes, detailed mockups are developed to show exactly how the finished website will look. These holistic designs include your brand colors, typographic style, imagery style, button style, and all other visual elements that will define your online presence.

We will keep the communication lines open throughout the design phase, asking for your input and making changes until the designs align with your vision perfectly. We found that by working together, we achieve better results and, ultimately, happier clients.

This is a lesson we have learned in the course of many years of web design: it is much easier (not to mention cheaper) to make changes in the design phase than after the development phase has begun. That is why we take our time to get designs right before proceeding to the next phase.

Our designers are in tune with new design trends, while dodging trends that will fade quickly. The idea is to create a design that is not trendy and thus will serve well for a number of years for your business.

Development: Making Your Design Come Alive

After the design passes approval, all the rest is up to the development team to metamorphose those static designs into a functional website. This is when the technical side of web design really starts working out.

Ellenom's clean and efficient code writing ensures that your website is both good-looking and very fast. Our developers are highly skilled in, but are not limited to, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP, so we can build websites with a lot of great-looking, advanced functions yet keep everything load fast.

Development, meanwhile, keeps the following in perspective:

• Front-end Development: Tidying up and converting design files into responsive web pages that will render and function perfectly
• Back-end Development: Build server-side components that will make working features like contact forms, search, and user accounts run
• Database Integration: Setting up and optimizing databases for fast storage and retrieval of website content and user data
• API Integration: Connecting your website to third-party services like payment processors, shipping calculators, social media integrations, and other apps

We follow industry best practices in organizing, documenting, and versioning the code used in our development. This will make it easier to maintain and update your site in the future, saving you both time and money.

One of the things that separates our development process from others is our intention to build websites that you can manage yourself if you so desire. We really want our clients empowered with the tools and knowledge to be able to make simple content updates without always having to call in a developer.

If you would rather have us do the updates and maintenance, we of course remain available through our ongoing support services.

Web Design Technical Considerations

There always exists a well-laid-out technical infrastructure behind a very good website. At Ellenom, we leave no stone unturned with the technical issues that make your site tick.

Website speed is arguably the most important technical factor. Studies show that 40% of visitors will abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Our development team uses a variety of speed optimization techniques to make sure your site opens up really quickly:

• Image optimization to shrink file size while preserving quality
• The minification of code, which consists of removing all unnecessary characters
• Browser caching - the process of saving frequently used files in your visitors' devices
• CDN- which serves files from servers closer to your visitors
• Lazy loading of images and videos so that only content currently in view is prioritized

Security is also a vastly important technical consideration. Cyber threats keep on changing and evolving; therefore, we enforce comprehensive security measures on every website we build:

• SSL certificates that secure connections
• Regular security updates and patches
• Secure form processing to safeguard submitted information
• Protection from common attacks like SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting

We carefully survey hosting infrastructure too, going on to recommend hosting solutions that suit the best balance of performance, reliability, and returns given your specific nature. A good hosting environment influences a lot in terms of speed, uptime, and overall user experience for your site.

The technical team has felt its way through the many obstacles over many years. There was one very interesting project where a client came to us after their previous developer had designed a beautiful looking site that unfortunately moved like a snail. By restructuring the database queries and implementing proper caching measures, we were able to reduce load times by more than 80%, which effectively translated to increased conversion rates and sales.

The Latest in Mobile Responsive Design is Necessary at This Mobile-First Age

More than half of the global traffic on the web now comes from these devices, so the change from desktop usage to mobile usage means that responsive design is not just a 'how nice it would be to have'; it is critical.

At Ellenom, we craft and develop all sites to be mobile-targeted from the ground up. We first envision how your site will function on small screens, then enhance it for those larger form-factor devices like tablets and desktops.

Mobile responsive design is not just about making a site smaller on the screen. It speaks to the entire experience of navigation on touchscreens: big buttons to hit accurately, reorganization of content to create a perfect interface, and so on, all crafted to suit a variety of devices.

Your responsive design has the following features for optimal experience on any device:

• Flexible grid patterns-Rezises according to dimensions of screens
• Appropriate scaling images according to devices
• Reshaping Navigation menus into easy end user mobile formats
• Easily accessible touch integrated interface shapes for fingertip controls
• News prioritization according to most important to least, with top headlines featured first on mobiles

Besides that with user experience, it now affects your rankings in search engines. Google now indexes the mobile version of your site first, meaning that it will rank and index mostly the mobile version. So, the more your site fails to be mobile-friendly, the less you will be visible in search results.

I understand it firsthand because one of our e-commerce clients saw mobile conversions increase by as much as 37 percent after we finally made their site truly, widely responsive, not just a shrunk-down version of their desktop site.

We subject all our responsive designs to exhaustive testing across a range of devices, screen sizes, and browsers to ensure that every visitor has an equally consistent high-quality experience, regardless of the device through which they access your site.

Optimization and Testing: To Make Sure Everything Performs at its Best

Creating the look and feel of a beautifully designed site is only half the battle; the other is making sure that it performs its functions optimally. At Ellenom, we undertake extensive testing and optimization processes to guarantee that the site offers every possible benefit to any visitor.

Our optimization and testing protocol consist of:

1. Cross-Browser Testing: Testing is performed on the Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc., to ensure consistent functionality with the same look and feel.
2. Speed Testing: Testing is carried out with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix, analyzing load times for page optimization to achieve faster loading times.
3. Mobile Testing: Mobile testing is carried out on devices of many screen sizes to verify that responsive design features operate correctly on those devices.
4. Functionality Testing: Every significant click-to-act interactive element such as forms and buttons, menus, and features are rigorously tested to ensure their 100% operability.
5. Accessibility Testing: We check your site for accessibility against the relevant standards, allowing navigation to be used by people with disabilities.

Performance optimization is a technical science and an artistic trade. We have certain tricks for some kinds of websites. For instance, on the e-commerce sites, we deal with product image optimization with special attention using tricks like adaptive serving (serving different image sizes based on the user's device type) and the use of newer image formats such as WebP.

For content-heavy sites, we emphasize implementing effective caching strategies and lazy loading, which massively improves perceived load time by bringing visible content to the priority list.

Where applicable, we run A/B tests on the most crucial landing pages by creating variations to establish which designs and layouts drive greater engagement and conversion rates. This means that design decisions can be backed by data so that your site is commercially optimized, not just pretty.

In one memorable instance, by putting a client company's website through our massive optimization scheme, average page load times for the client were reduced from 6.2 seconds to an average of just 1.8 seconds. This ultimately led to a resultant 23% increase in submissions from a contact form and longer average session duration.

User Experience: The Primary Consideration for Effective Web Design

For UX designers, websites must please not simply the eyes of the beholder but the actual user, aiding him or her in every possible way throughout usage. We believe that a good user experience is a foundation for good web design at Ellenom.

Effective UX design focuses on the users—their needs, behaviors, preferences, and pain points. When possible, we do user research and create personas that represent typical visitors to your site. These personas help us with design decisions, always keeping real users in our forefront thought while designing.

Navigation is another pillar in favor of user experience. Therefore, we design navigation as being intuitive, putting the user in the position of getting from one place to another with minimum effort. This includes a clear menu structure, sensible hierarchy, and placement of vital links and calls-to-actions.

Content organization is another major consideration in UX design. We structure information that makes sense to users, breaking it into digestible chunks while using visual hierarchy to direct attention to the most important elements.

Interaction design—how users interact with elements on your site—is carefully considered. Everything from hover effects to form interactions is designed to feel right and responsive, delivering just enough feedback to guide the user along their journey on your site.

We have alluded to page load speed being one of the real contenders for a critical UX factor. Make users feel at home on your site? Even the prettiest of websites are bound to make users irritated if loading time is slow.

Having been in web design for years across various industries, I have observed one major trend-form follows function. An example of that would be one of our clients, in the professional services sector, who witnessed a 45% surge in lead generation after we redesigned their site in favor of UX-first design, all without a drop in traffic.

Remember: Your website is there to help your users. If they have a good experience, they will probably stay longer, come back again, and perform the actions you desire-whether that is a purchase, filling a contact form, or subscribing to your newsletter.

SEO-Aligned Content: Making You Visible

When clients cannot find a website, even the best design doesn't stand a chance for the business. Therefore, at Ellenom, we go ahead and integrate search engine optimization principles into the web design right from the get-go.

Our SEO-aligned web design process is as follows:

• Keyword Research: Identifying the words and phrases your potential customers are searching for
• Content Strategy: Developing website content that will naturally incorporate these keywords while adding a value to the visitor
• Technical SEO: Building a website with clean code, a proper sense of headings, and schema markup that is easily consumable by search engines
• Page Speed Optimization: Greatly considering fast load time, which is a huge ranking factor
• Mobile Optimization: Fully responsive designs performing well on all devices

While designing content for your website, we pay great attention to addressing the questions that your potential customers are asking. This very approach is mostly in line with how search engines rate the quality of the content.

Heading structures (H1, H2, H3...) are set up to provide guidance for search engines regarding the relationship between the various sections of your content. Each of these pages targets particular keywords without overstuffing or using artificial language.

Images are optimized via their descriptive filenames and alt text in such a way that accessibility is improved and search engines are provided with more context with respect to your content.

Technical SEO is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the techies from our dev department; these include aspects like canonical tags, proper URL structures, XML sitemaps, etc. Despite doubtlessly being behind-the-scenes elements from a user perspective, these are crucial for the search engines to index and rank your site.

We offer complete SEO services to clients looking to take their SEO to the next level to build upon the groundwork laid by the web design process.

I have seen the power of SEO-aligned website design more times than I can count. One small business client went from having almost no organic search traffic to first-page results for a slew of valuable industry terms just three months after launching their new site; all because we applied SEO best practices at every stage of the design process right from day one.

Content Management System (CMS): Empowering You to Manage Your Website

A nice-looking and well-performing website is worth nothing if it doesn't allow you to make updates easily as your business changes. For this reason, we build most of our websites on powerful content management systems that allow you to manage your digital presence.

At Ellenom, we work with many of the top content management systems, customizing our choice for your specific needs:

• WordPress: The most popular CMS in the world, offering unmatched flexibility in the presence of a gigantic ecosystem of plugins and themes
• Shopify: For e-commerce settings, excellently built-in tools to sell goods across the internet
• Webflow: A happy marriage of design freedom and an intuitive visual editor for beautiful designs without the complexity
• Custom CMS Solutions: For projects with very unique requirements that off-the-shelf systems cannot provide

Upon implementing a CMS, we customize the whole admin interface to make it as user-friendly as possible. We strip away unnecessary options that may cause confusion, while organizing the content-editing experience in a manner that makes sense according to how you'd actually use the system in question.

We also create and configure custom content types and fields that fit your specific content needs. For instance, if case studies are a regular post type for you, we develop a separate "Case Study" content type with fields that have been specifically customized for the task, thus allowing greater ease in ensuring consistency across similar content.

Training is critical to our implementation of CMS. We run dedicated training sessions to make you and your team comfortable managing your website. We also build customized documentation containing step-by-step instructions for common tasks to give you a reference that you can go back to as you need.

Choosing an appropriate CMS will cut your ongoing website maintenance costs dramatically, as you would be able to make content updates without having to consult a developer for even minor changes. However, if you'd rather sit back while someone else handles your website updates, we also provide full website maintenance services.

From my experience, businesses that have the ability to update their sites with speed and ease are characterized by having current and relevant content, which is beneficial for both the users and search engine ranking. One client that we served in the event planning space nearly doubled its content production after migrating to an easy-to-use CMS, resulting in a significant boost in organic traffic.

Ongoing Support and Maintenance: Keeping Your Website at Peak Performance

A website is never "finished." Technology changes, security threats emerge, and your business changes. Ongoing support and maintenance are, thus, integral to our web design services at Ellenom.

Our website maintenance services extend to:

• Regular Software Updates: Updates of your CMS, plugins, and themes for security and functionality
• Security Monitoring: Security threat monitoring to proactively respond to security incidents
• Performance Optimization: Periodic testing and optimizing of webpage speed for fast-loading experiences
• Backup Management: Regularly backing up all website content and settings securely
• Technical Support: Support for anything that may come up in the meantime
• Content Updates: Content help whenever required

We have a variety of maintenance plans to address different needs and budgets. Some clients go for a full "hands-off" maintenance package, in which we take care of everything, while others choose basic plans covering essentials and do the routine content updates themselves.

Periodic maintenance prevents problems but also optimizes site performance over time. While maintaining the site, we find opportunities for tweaking and improving it that weren't observed in the original build.

Clients appreciate the proactive approach to ongoing support. Instead of waiting for problems to arise, we conduct audits on a regular basis to locate potential problems and fix them before they affect the performance or security of your site.

One especially sticks in my mind. A client turned us down for maintenance, only to return a few months later with a website that was hacked due to outdated plugins. Cleaning the hack and restoring the site cost way more than what they would have spent on our maintenance to begin with. It was a lesson hard learnt that regular maintenance is not just an expense, but an investment into the security and longevity of your digital asset.

For more information on our support and maintenance plans, see our services page or get in touch with us directly.

Web Design Process, From Idea to Implementation

Through years of successful websites across various businesses, we have been able to fine-tune our web design process to ensure it fits all things: nothing gets through the cracks while allowing enough flexibility for your unique things.

Here is a summary of our winning web design process:

1. Discovery: It starts with understanding your business, goals, target audience, and competition by conducting stakeholder interviews, audience research, and competitive analysis.
2. Planning: We then create a strategic plan for the site, including site architecture, content strategy, and functionality requirements depending on the discovery findings.
3. Wireframing: We produce wireframes (simplified layout sketches) that exhibit how important pages will be structured without distractions from design elements.
4. Design: Using brand elements, our designers create the thorough visual mockup from approved wireframes, creating a cohesive visual experience all the way through.
5. Client Review & Revision: You get to see its designs and then give your commentary, which we put through revision rounds until we reach that sweet spot where everything is perfect for you.
6. Development: This process will be handled by our developers, who will convert the approved designs into a fully functional website-given all the great features and functionality that the website is supposed to support.
7. Content Population: We will put your content on the site and optimize it for the users and search engines.
8. Testing & Quality Assurance: We will conduct this rigorous testing of the site across devices, browsers, and screen sizes so that we ensure that nothing just does not work.
9. Client Training: If you will be managing your site yourself, we will train you on the content management system.
10. Launch: After going through all approvals, we now deploy the newly created site into your live domain.
11. Post-Launch Support: After launch, we check on the site to quickly troubleshoot issues and amend as necessary on the go.

Throughout this process, clear communication is essential. Regular update meetings are kept on and the provision of access to project management tools that allow you to track progress and feedback in real-time.

One thing I learned after years of running many web projects: there is never a single project that goes according to plan in terms of time or scope. What really makes our process different is how we deal with it: openly, communicating well, and solving with creativity.

This process generally takes from 6 to 12 weeks to implement, depending on how big or complex your site is, but we will let you know quite soon when it is all going to happen: specific dates, times, and locations-completion milestones will be shared with you beforehand as they are finely scheduled. Above all, enjoy the journey!

Website Types: Tailored Approaches for Varied Needs

Distinct organizations have distinct website requirements. Ellenom specializes in the creation and development of various types of websites, with distinct considerations and best practices for each.

Business Websites

Business websites act as digital headquarters for firms of all sizes. It must lay out your value propositions, establish credibility, and generate leads. Business websites are, therefore, designed in a clean and professional manner with call-to-action buttons and content that communicates clearly what we would want to be seen by an audience and generate leads. Items usually included though vary per design are company info, services/products information, profiles of team members, testimonials, case studies, and contact details. View our examples of business website work in London web design or Los Angeles web design.

E-Commerce Websites

Special functionality for the online selling of products or services needs to be built up. We build e-commerce sites focused on easy browsing of products, secure checking-out processes, inventory management, integrated into payment gateways and shipping solutions. E-commerce design should ideally promote the product effectively with minimal interruptions to the purchase process, along with trust signals to spur conversion.

Personal Websites

Personal websites assist an individual in expressing his personality, skills, and accomplishments. Be it for a freelancer, a job seeker, or a public figure, we build personal websites that tell the story well and help the clients achieve their personal branding objectives. These sites usually include biography information, portfolios of works, blogs, and contact information.

Community and Membership Websites

Community and membership websites foster interaction among users, allowing for access to unique content or features. Here we create robust user management systems, discussion forums, a member directory, and content restriction mechanisms. The focus is on creating engaging spaces where members of the community can meet one another and find valuable resources.

Educational and eLearning Websites

Educational websites effectively deliver content and extend tracking on students. Our eLearning websites involve course management progress tracking, assessment tools, and interactive learning. Content organization and user experience are given careful consideration to make learning fun and accessible.

Websites for Entertainment & Media

Entertainment and media sites are designed to house attractive audio/visual content. We include rich media gallery, video integration, and audio players and organize content in ways to facilitate easy discovery and enjoyment of your media. Media sites, in particular, require performance optimization.

Health & Wellness Websites

Professional and approachable make health and wellness sites available. We design them to establish credibility and exhibit professionalism while practically allowing patients or clients to have access to information and book appointments. Special considerations are given to accessibility and straightforward terms concerning health information that can be complicated.

Real Estate & Property Websites

Real estate websites need to have very good property listing and searching capabilities. Interactive maps, filters, virtual tours, and lead capture forms can be inserted into these sites. The design focuses on high-quality imagery and easy access to property detail.

Travel & Tourism Websites

Travel websites are supposed to inspire, and at the same time give practical information on booking regarding various travel packages. We design sites with websites but provide an itinerary builder, immersive imagery, interactive maps, and booking systems. The primary focus is an emotional approach while practical information is easily accessible.

Portfolio and Creative Websites

Design impact, portfolio sites showcase creative works. Designing these sites brings your work into center stage through beautifully designed galleries, case studies, and project descriptions. The design itself often resembles your creative personality while ensuring your work is in focus.

The type of website you require does not matter; our team has the expertise to develop an appropriate solution to fulfill your needs and achieve your objectives. Read what our approach is with regard to these websites on our web design services page.

Choosing the Right Web Design Partner

Indeed, one of the most crucial decisions in your online presence is selecting the right web design agency. The appropriate partner can give wings to your brand and direct business results; a little long wrong choice can waste all your precious time, money and business opportunities.

Here are some important things to keep in mind while evaluating the potential web design partners:

• Portfolio: Check their previous works so that you can learn if their style and quality of designing corresponds to what you need. On the one hand, you can check if they have done projects that are aligned with what you need exactly.
• Process: Ask how they go about designing and developing. A structure showcases professionalism and reliability.
• Technical Expertise: Make sure they have experience regarding the technologies and platforms pertinent to your project.
• Industry Experience: Its not so vital but valuable since that might serve an advantage in understanding more the specific challenges and opportunities that the company might face concerning the industry.
• Reviews and Testimonials: You can check what their former clients speak of to work with them. You can look at our clients' feedback on our reviews page.
• Communication Style: As a will close, so good communication is vital; thus, make sure their way of communicating is the same with you.
• Support and Maintenance: What next after launching your site? Do they provide ongoing support and maintenance services?
• Budget and Timeline: Make sure their structure of pricing and availability will fit your budget and timeframe.

We, at Ellenom, emphasize a lot on transparency. Right from the beginning, we explain very clearly regarding the procedure, time taken, and price so that there isn't any surprise in between the course. We clarify your business goals because at the end of the day, this website is going to be worked to results, not only focussed on your design tastes.

Given that we are a cooperative team, it means that you will always have to offer an input at the most important turns without getting stuck in every tiny detail. This balance makes for your vision to be realized while benefiting from our expertise.

If you would like to know more about how we work and discuss your project needs, then please contact us for a consultation. We'll be happy to answer your questions and talk about whether we're the right partner for your web design project.