What Makes a Great Website in 2024? The Do’s and Don’ts
Does Your Business Even Need a Website Anymore?
Before we get started, let's address the elephant in the room. You might be thinking, "Uh, it’s 2024. Social media is free. I can promote myself and my business on one of those platforms. Do I even need a website?"
The short answer? UH, YES!
Websites will always be meaningful. A powerfully designed website gives people 24/7 access to your offerings and services. It helps you build trust among your potential clients. It provides a global reach beyond a local audience and gives you insight into user behavior. It is an indispensable tool for showcasing your business identity and making sales.
Social media is excellent for promoting your business and marketing, but you’re often at war with an invisible puppeteer: the algorithm. The algorithm is a set of rules determining what specific content or type of content appears on someone’s feed. It incorporates many factors like user activity, post information, time, location, and device (to name a few). And guess what? It is ALWAYS changing.
That can make it challenging to build your audience because getting your content to reach the people who need it can be tricky. Even if you’re willing to spend a monthly budget on paid advertisements (versus trying to reach users organically), there are no guarantees you will get them to the right people. Plus, you are at the mercy of choices that tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are making…yikes.
If you don’t already have a website, we recommend you check out our previous blog post, 7 Reasons Why Every Small Business Needs a Website. This is a beneficial guide to assist you in getting started and explains in detail what to keep in mind. If you have questions about what you should look for in a website designer before you hire them, we’ve got you covered there, too! This post is mainly for businesses that already have a website.
Learn the Do’s and Don’ts to Refresh Your Website
Knowing what you can do with your site to set your business apart and cut through the noise is challenging in this digital age. But guess what? You can do plenty of things to polish up your existing website and ensure it’s attracting and engaging your potential clients!
If you search “great website design,” you’ll find articles that give tips and tricks to make your website stand out from many other sites. Often, these posts are influenced by the author’s personal biases. They may not unpack website design best practices that consider web accessibility, proper SEO hierarchy, and comprehension rates of color and typographical choices.
Keep reading to learn Design Powers do’s and don’ts for refreshing the website you already have!
“Your website is the center of your digital eco-system, like a brick and mortar location, the experience matters once a customer enters, just as much as the perception they have of you before they walk through the door.”
DO figure out who you want to talk to with your website
Marketing to your potential clients will be difficult if you don’t know whom you want to sell to. Before you can truly level up your website, you need to figure out who the website is for. Like your other marketing materials, your website must elucidate the problems your business solves and the steps your visitor needs to take to engage with you.
So how do you start? You need…
A Clear Purpose
Your website should do what your client expects it to and what you need it to do. Define the purpose of your site — what’s its primary job?
A Defined Audience
Know who your site is for and, just as importantly, who it’s NOT for. Don’t waste time and resources trying to market your business to people not in the market for your product or service!
Identify your target market. Who visits your website? What kinds of content resonate with that demographic?
For example, our ideal client at Design Powers is a small-to-medium-sized professional services firm ready to rebrand its website with clear messaging, brand identity, and custom photography. They're looking for additional design and marketing services post-launch to get higher-quality leads and increase revenue.
That doesn’t mean we don’t work with clients who don’t exactly fit that description, but it does delineate who we’re best to work with.
After you know who you’re trying to connect with, test out researched marketing strategies to engage your audience. Are you struggling to identify who you’re talking to or pivoting your services? Our Power Plan (discovery) will help.
Strong Calls to Action (CTA’s)
What do you want your visitors to do once they arrive? How would you like them to interact with you? CTA’s tell the visitor what to do, especially when used in a way that speaks to the client’s values and needs.
Some good examples of calls to action examples are ‘Learn More,’ ‘Subscribe,’ and ‘Try for Free.’ These are simple directional statements. If you can think of a call to action specific to your brand and service, that’s even better!
The goal is to leave a lasting impression on visitors. On our home page, we have two CTA buttons. The first one says “Work With Us” which links to our contact page and encourages visitors to schedule a call with us. The second one, “About Us,” links to our About page and tells visitors more about who we are as a business and a team of three.
“There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.”
DON'T clutter up your site with too many design choices
A simple-to-use website can differentiate between creating a connection with your audience or pushing potential clients away.
A research study conducted by Google in 2012 found that users don’t like websites with excessive visual complexity. In most cases, people will decide whether they like or dislike a site’s design in less than a tenth of a second. That means you have milliseconds to make a good impression on your audience or risk losing their interest!
Responsive Design
Your website must be easily viewable and usable regardless of the device it is viewed with (desktop, tablet, mobile). Read more about why your website must have a responsive web design.
Find Your Unique Style
Your site needs a distinctive personality, also known as brand design. You want your style choices to create a lasting impression on your clients.
Our website design projects are entirely customized to the client’s brand. Our client's websites incorporate distinctive design elements. These include (but aren’t limited to) curated videos playing behind or next to text sections, logo animations, custom icons, photos and graphics.
Use High-Quality Images
If your photos aren’t great, your site won’t look great. Avoid stock photos if you can. Include pictures of your staff, your ideal clients, or, ideally, both! This will give your site a more personal touch and make visitors feel they know you and what you’re about.
We have several blogs that extensively detail rebranding yourself, how to discover your signature style, and what to expect when you hire a professional fashion stylist, brand photographer, hair stylist, and makeup artist.
Choose the Right Typography
Type is the foundation for print and web content. Ensure your fonts are readable and don’t clash with other stylistic choices. After all, good web design typography adds value. It’s where content meets design. Bad typography choices will distract people from reading and cause them to bounce off your website.
There are endless font combinations to choose from. You can use Font Pair for examples of complimentary Google font pairings. Adobe Fonts is included in any Creative Cloud subscription and has a vast selection. Ensure the font is on your website’s platform; otherwise, you must custom-code it or choose an alternative.
Pick a Professional Color Palette
A perfect color combination attracts the right users, while a poor combination can lead to distraction and confusion. When choosing a color palette, it’s essential to consider using colors that align with your brand identity and appeal to your target audience.
When choosing colors, you have to balance emotions and functionality. We recommend using bold colors to highlight CTA’s and more subtle colors to make those longer text sections more effortless. Remember, form follows function! Always prioritize readability and user experience.
If you’re struggling with picking a sound color palette, try using a color generator to give you some ideas or hire a professional designer. Are you debating if you should DIY your website or hire a professional? Read this list of pros and cons of DIYing and hiring a website designer to decide what to do.
Use Better Messaging
Your site can look great, but the design won't save it if your copy doesn’t make sense. Although much of this blog post focuses on how things look, feel, and operate, never forget that content is king!
Messaging on your site should always come before design. Have you tried writing your content & don’t know where to start? Follow our guide on writing website content, or hire a professional content writer to do it for you. Read our 4 reasons why.
Keep Your Eye on Trends
The web design space constantly evolves, and trends come and go. In 2025, we predict muted colors will continue to gain popularity among brands, gradients will continue to trend, and the use of cool colors for background sections and bold, warm colors for CTAs will continue.
We’re seeing a rise in animation, scroll effects and video as movement is needed to keep people engaged in content. Parallax scrolling is also making a comeback. Layered graphics, photos, and custom illustrations are having their moment.
Rounded corners, increased white space and the minimalistic design aesthetic will never die. Generative content, both written and visual will increase. Chunks of scannable content and short FAQ sections will be expected as users get used to AI and its ever-growing faster and more accurate responses.
The nostalgic, vintage, and retro design may be winding down as futuristic, bright, bold colors take hold in digital environments. That being said, consider color psychology and how humans are sensory beings—the feeling of physical, handcrafted materials and tangible experiences will always remain timeless.
“Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries.”
DO make your site easy to navigate
A confusing website is the easiest way to push away potential clients and guarantee they won’t revisit your site.
After all, who wants to spend precious time figuring out what you offer when they can go back to Google and find someone who more effectively addresses their pain points?
Straightforward Navigation
Make sure your site is easy to navigate. Read our website writing blog post, specifically the part about page structure.
Limit your navigation to five items or less. Put the #1 action you want people to make in the primary CTA. Occasionally, people wander around searching sites, but typically, they are actively looking for something specific and want to find it quickly.
Fast Load Time
A fast website is essential for maintaining a high number of page views and ensuring customer satisfaction.
The goal is to provide your website visitors with the best possible user experience. You can improve your website performance by choosing the right image file format and optimizing it for the web.
How is your page speed performing? Conduct a site speed test to see your website's load time. Sometimes, these tests are inaccurate for websites built on SaaS platforms like Squarespace. Feel free to peruse more helpful tips for improving your website's speed.
Have a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate
A secure website is a must-have. To keep your users’ data secure, verify your ownership of the website, prevent attackers from creating a fake version of your site, and keep the trust of your users, you’ll need an SSL certificate.
We use Squarespace, which has this built into the platform, but if you’re using an open-source platform like WordPress, you’ll need to be sure your web hosting provider has this installed. Some hosts charge extra for it.
Get Your Legal Ducks in a Row
If you don’t have legal policies on your website, all we can say is good luck, babe! Although in the United States, there aren’t any federally mandated laws requiring you to have a privacy policy (aside from COPPA), new data and privacy laws go into effect all the time.
We recommend that all the sites we build for our clients have terms of service, privacy policies, cookie policies, and accessibility statements. We use Termaggedon to help generate these documents. As the age of AI is here, we recently added an AI policy to be transparent with our audience about how we’re using AI.
“When you really go for inclusion and belonging, that’s when you start to see retention. That’s when you start to see innovation and heightened creativity.”
DON’T isolate yourself from your audience
Your business needs reviews. When people visit your site, they want proof that others have tried out your business and had a good experience.
They also want to feel like they know who you are and what you’re about after visiting your site. Reviews are a wonderful way to communicate that sort of information. You can only promote yourself so much; sometimes, you must let satisfied customers promote you!
Testimonials and Reviews
Photos, videos, and quotes from real people are incredibly effective selling mechanisms. Potential customers will want to know that your claims can be backed up by other clients who have been through the process.
Make it easy for people to review your business. Share your review link with your clients and ask for a quick review. You can even give your client a few talking points and give them an image to post with their written review. This will save them time and increase the likelihood of posting a review for you.
After every design project, we ask our clients for honest reviews, and we now have 70 5-star reviews on our Google Business Profile!
To make asking for reviews painless, add a review link to your email signature. You can also dedicate a page on your website to leaving reviews or link to your third-party review platform and add a CTA to review you. If you’re struggling to get online clients' reviews or want to learn more, head over to our blog post on how to get reviews.
Social Media Links
Check your links to confirm they work and correspond to the correct social profiles. This allows people to view you outside of your website and connect on social media (more marketing channels). We post on LinkedIn and Instagram — come say hi!
Share Valuable Content with Your Audience
Blogs are good for creating fresh content, connecting with your audience, and boosting your SEO. Don’t be afraid to get a little personal. People also want to see what kind of person you are outside your business. Blogging is one of the best organic SEO strategies. Learn what it takes to improve your SEO & how to get to the top of Google.
We also recommend that you design a lead magnet for your website for your clients. A free downloadable lead magnet offers visitors information about a topic or service. For example, if you’re a pet service company, you could offer a lead magnet about when to know when you should send your new pet to obedience school.
Maybe you run a grant writing service and want to offer your audience a checklist of all the documents you must complete before submitting a government grant. We have several free guides on our website. After all, who doesn’t love a free download?
“Forget artificial intelligence – in the brave new world of big data, it’s artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.”
DO be cautious when using AI
Listen, I get it. Having a machine do your research and work for you sounds super appealing. We’ve all logged into ChatGPT to ask it a silly question or used Adobe Firefly to make AI images based on our text prompts.
While AI technology has exploded in software everywhere, we recommend that you use caution when relying on it to build your website, write your content, or design your logo.
As Christina Pazzanese from the Harvard Gazette tells us, “…its game-changing promise to do things like improve efficiency, bring down costs, and accelerate research and development has been tempered of late with worries that these complex, opaque systems may do more societal harm than economic good.” Not to mention its detrimental environmental impact.
You Can’t Trademark AI
The problem with AI is that it’s in its infancy. AI generators source their material by scanning what is already available online. This includes images of original art and designs uploaded by creators that may have it trademarked already. So, without knowing it, you could be stealing someone's intellectual property IP (and unintentionally exposing your business to litigation).
It’s cool to mess around with AI to get inspiration for logos or to see what you like and don’t like. However, you cannot trademark AI artwork because you don’t own the source material. It is the same for using artwork that you have downloaded from stock websites like iStock and Envato. If you genuinely want to trademark your assets and OWN them, you must create them from a human source. Not a computer-manufactured recreation.
We’ve gone toe-to-toe with AI a few times in logo design to see if they can beat our design sensibilities. I’ll let you be the judge, but spoiler alert: we design better.
AI Websites
Many website builders, such as Wix, WordPress, and even our beloved Squarespace, have rolled out AI software to help new creators easily build their sites.
Squarespace’s AI software is called Blueprint, which promises to help any user start a new website by answering five design questions regarding your preferred website structure, color palette, and font pairing. You can also choose from a mix of modern and traditional styles. Each selection you make gives you a real-time preview of your website. Once completed, Blueprint converts your choices into the framework of a personalized website that you can continue to edit. You can check out more about Blueprint and other Squarespace AI tools.
While these generators are a helpful way for you to get started if you’re trying to DIY your site, there is no replacement for humans just yet. Plus, they are all still in their early stages of development, so there are limited options for you to choose from and, therefore, limited outputs you can get.
This directly negates many of the points we’ve established above that are crucial for your website: great visual content, well-written copy, and unique design. AI can only create something based on what you tell it, so it will not make the decisions if you don’t know what you want.
In Conclusion
Designing and launching a website that effectively communicates your vision might seem daunting. By taking it one step at a time (and following helpful guides like this one), you’ll be surprised at how achievable a goal it is.
By using the right tools and team and maintaining your vision as the highest priority, you’ll have a site worth being proud of in no time! Need some help? We’re here for you. Schedule a call.
