Developing a clean, semantic, and cross-browser responsive website seems to be easy at first but it is definitely a tough job. As we are welcoming New Year 2016, there are few important points to be well taken care of if you are planning to design a website for your business.

1. Mobile First Approach: According to comScore more than 80% internet users have Smartphone. So while developing your website, you must go for responsive user experience, otherwise chances are high that you will lose traffic to your competition.

 2. Super easy Navigation: Browsing your website must not be as difficult as to hunt treasure in Pacific Ocean rather it should offer easy to use, straight forward across web browsers or mobile devices.

3. Optimized and speedy: Your website must not take ages to load. Ideally, it should load within 3 seconds. A fast and quick to load website has lesser bounce rate.

4. Keep It Simple: As Leonardo da Vinci said ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’. Please keep it simple. Making website too animated and flashy may confuse your visitor and also slows down it to a reasonable extend.

5. Engage and retain users: In this era of social networking, y

our website must offer and engage users with quality, interesting content and imagery. It shouldn’t sound monotonous. You must use logins through facebook, twitter etc if you have login feature and user must have option to share the content whichever they find interesting.

6. Remove broken links and canonical issues: You need to get your website thoroughly tested to check if it still has any broken link or canonical issues which not only hurts your SEO ranking but  also ruins the good will visitors may have for your website.

7. Is your contact form and details easily visible? Contact us forms and details must be kept very handy on your website to get leads. Contact us forms must not be very lengthy with too many compulsory fields. Forms with too many compulsory fields are less likely to get leads. Use captcha to keep robots away. Do not want too many calls, use email id and respond within 24 hours.

8. SEO Ready: In the same way with recent Google’s Panda algorithm update , your onsite content strategy must be very carefully designed and must give appropriate weight age to targeted keywords. While create on site strategy, you need to focus on the few important points like:

– Content must be of high quality and original.
– Careful text formatting on the page using Italics, bold, bullets, Atl tags etc etc
– Grammar and sentence formatting
– Use of heading and sub-heads
– Length of the content and appropriate optimized images to support the message.

Only hire a web developer who follows the best practices and has got expertise in UI/UX optimization. If you feel your website is not following these practices, hire a web expert to analyze it.