it.com Launching Websites for IT Startups: Design, Content and Testing Tips for Success

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When all technical aspects, such as choosing a platform and ensuring website security are taken care of, it’s time to consider how the site will look and how to test it effectively.

The content and design of a website help to form the desired impression among users, inspire confidence in the business and lead customers to the target action. Ideally, these tasks should be trusted to specialists. However, if you are keen to go DIY, we’ve prepared a few tips to ensure your website appeals to potential clients.

Web Design​

Design helps gain your site recognition among users encouraging them to form a visual impression of your brand, stay on it, and take the desired action. To make your site look modern and relevant, follow the latest trends in web design. Take inspiration from the websites of well-known brands like Apple, or use special platforms where some of the best-in-class examples are shared.

Source: Awwwards

Awwwards is a platform for web-design creativity that features award-winning websites. Awwwards enlists the help of modern web design’s best to judge each submission.

Source: Behance

Behance is a platform that helps creators showcase their work, allowing users to explore new design ideas and inspiration. Its detailed filtering options help find anything from the latest typography to the most-discussed UI (user interface) designs.

Source: Designspiration

Designspiration is like Pinterest for the design world. It’s a platform where you can spend hours browsing through a feed of designs curated by the community.

Source: Dribbble

Dribbble is a community of designers who share their work, develop their skills, and find other designers’ work in one convenient marketplace. It’s a great resource for anyone looking for design ideas and inspiration.

Source: Footer

For those looking for specific website design ideas and inspiration, Footer offers a wide range of footer designs. You can browse by type or style, with tags ranging from 3D to 420, AI, architecture, book, colorful, construction, dark, fitness, fun, iOS, landscaping, MacOS, monochromatic, news, startup, typography, unusual layout and WatchOS.

When creating a website design, take those three tips into consideration:

1. Choose a style and color palette. Your website should reflect your brand identity. Use a logo, brand fonts, colors and elements that align with your company’s mission. For example, a company may place a strong emphasis on quality and reliability. To convey these values in the logo, you could incorporate elements that are associated with them, such as clear lines and symmetrical shapes. Additionally, certain colors are commonly associated with specific fields of activity:

• Blue is a good choice for financial institutions, the technology industry, education, medicine and pharmaceuticals, travel and tourism.
• Red is a popular color in the IT sector, where it conveys speed, energy, and innovation. It is also widely used by companies in the food industry as it stimulates appetite.
• Orange is a good choice for educational institutions. It helps to attract attention and motivate students. Orange is also used in cosmetics and skin care as it symbolizes freshness and health.
• Yellow is commonly seen in the food and automotive industries.

Use two to three main colors and one to two accent colors to avoid visual chaos.

The website features carefully chosen fonts, branding, and a cohesive color scheme. It’s common in the IT industry to use shades of purple to symbolize quality and modernity

1. Pay attention to user experience (UX). The site interface should be intuitive and convenient to use. Focus on navigation, content structure, and information accessibility. Define the main sections, such as the home page, information about the company, services, blog, contact information, and so on. This will help users easily find the information they need. The menu should be accessible from any page. Add ‘breadcrumbs’ for easy navigation. The easier it is for users to find what they want, the more likely they are to stay on your site.

An example of ‘breadcrumbs’. ‘Breadcrumbs’ is a navigation element on a website or in a program. It displays the route from the starting element to the user’s location and allows easy return to previous sections

1. Use high-quality images and graphics. Don’t neglect the quality of images, icons, and graphics in your design. Don’t forget to optimize images for fast loading and add a descriptive alt tag (an attribute in HTML code that contains alternative text for an image. It is used to describe the content of the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason) to prep for image search.

Content​

The content is the heart of your website, and its quality directly influences the success of your project. It also affects how users perceive your business. What should you consider when creating content?

Texts

Texts should be both informative and engaging for your audience. To make your text content stand out, use SEO (search engine optimization) keywords in your headings (H1-H3), meta tags, and the first paragraph.

If you plan to start a blog, consider writing several articles in advance. This will help you attract more traffic and showcase your expertise in your field.

Tools:

• Google Keyword Planner is a free tool from Google that helps you search and analyze keywords.
• Ubersuggest is an SEO tool that helps users find keywords, analyze competitors, and improve their search engine rankings.
• Notion is a versatile application for organizing information and managing projects that, with built-in AI, will help you write text in a given style.
• DeepSeek is an artificial intelligence (AI) language model that, depending on your tasks and prompts, will help you write a text or even create a content strategy.

Visuals

Sometimes, visuals can convey your company’s values and services better than text. For instance, you can show statistics via diagrams or highlight the steps of your work process using video. Don’t overlook the power of visuals such as images, infographics, and videos. They can greatly enhance the overall experience of your website.

To increase engagement, consider using video case studies, animated product schematics, or infographics with numerical data. For instance, a software startup can include a short video about how its product helps customers save time.

Tools:

• Pexels is an online library of stock images and videos.
• Canva is an online editor of visual content; images, videos, animations and documents.
• Dreamstudio AI is an AI-powered tool for generating images based on text descriptions.
• Creately is an online tool for visual prototyping and diagramming that simplifies the process of creating infographics, diagrams, mockups and other visual materials.
• AI tools for video generate videos based on text descriptions.

Reviews

Customer reviews are a powerful tool for building trust in your business.

Create a dedicated section on your website where users can leave their feedback. This will help new customers make informed purchasing decisions.

You can provide a feedback form to make it easier for customers to leave specific information. In this case, you will need to moderate the reviews you receive yourself. If you only publish positive ones, potential customers may feel distrust.

You can also pull reviews from review platforms to your site using special widgets. What kind of widgets these will be depends on which platform you choose to create a website.

According to a report by Bright Local, a British digital marketing platform, Google has been the most preferred platform for 5 years now. Create a card in Google Business and place your company on Google maps and customers will be able to leave and read reviews, finding your company through search or maps.

Source: Brightlocal

Tools:

• HubSpot is a review management platform that allows you to manage customer reviews from different platforms in one place.
• Trustmary is a platform that helps companies collect, manage and showcase customer reviews.
• ReviewTrackers is an online review management platform.

Testing​

Before launching a website, it’s important to thoroughly test it to ensure its functionality and user-friendliness.

What Should be Tested on a Website​

1. Appearance: Check that all elements, such as buttons, images, and texts, are displayed correctly. Pay attention to fonts, colors, indents, button clickability, drop-down menus, and page transitions. Additionally, make sure to look for typos, broken images, and errors in video and audio content.
2. Adaptability: Ensure that the website looks great and works well across different devices and browsers. All elements should be accessible and easy to interact with, regardless of the screen size or device type. Check for issues such as scaling, layout, and the convenience of the touch interface.
3. Links and forms: Verify that all links lead to the intended pages, and that forms are sent correctly. Check that data is sent to the correct email address. Additionally, test the functionality of payment systems, chatbots, and subscriptions to avoid any user frustration.
4. Performance: Ensure that all pages of your website load quickly and correctly. This will help improve the user experience and ensure that visitors can navigate through your site smoothly.

How to Test a Website​

To ensure the correct functioning and visual appearance of your website, you’ll need to manually go through and test each page and element. However, there are several tools available that can help to some extent automate the testing process. Here are some examples:

Chrome DevTools

Source: Chrome DevTools

Chrome DevTools is a comprehensive set of tools built into the Google Chrome browser for debugging websites. With these tools, you can check:

• Elements. This tab shows you the structure of a web page and the styles applied to each HTML element. You can instantly modify the document structure, apply or remove CSS styles, and much more.
• Network. Analyze network performance by displaying the load time for each resource on the site. Identify resources that may be slowing down page loading by analyzing each request and response received. This helps optimize page loading.
• Performance. Conduct a comprehensive analysis of page loading time and interface response during user interaction. Record a page session and then view all the processes occurring in the browser in detail to identify and optimize those moments where performance is lost.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Source: Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a tool for checking how well your website is optimized for mobile devices. The service checks each page individually and highlights the main errors on the site. This tool:

• Confirms whether pages are optimized.
• Allows you to view an HTML code.
• Helps you understand the server response code and whether your site is indexable by search engines.
• Provides insights into the causes of display issues on mobile devices.

BrowserStack

Source: [URL='https://www.browserstack.com/']BrowserStack[/URL]

BrowserStack is a cloud-based platform that enables you to test your products on a wide range of browsers, operating systems, and real devices. Some of its benefits include:

• Works with Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, as well as popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer.
• Allows you to interact with the application on the selected device or browser in real-time.
• Supports popular frameworks like Selenium, Appium, and Cypress for efficient testing.
• Enables application testing on your local computer or within a closed network without the need for deployment to public servers.
• Provides analysis and reporting tools allowing you to view screenshots, videos and test logs for a better understanding of the results of testing.

Screaming Frog

Source: Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a tool that helps you conduct technical SEO audits of websites.

Some key features of the tool include:

• Page titles and meta-description analysis.
• Finds broken links and duplicate content.
• Analyzes external and internal links.
• Sitemap Generation.
• Image checking.

Dead Link Checker

Source: Dead Link Checker

Dead Link Checker is an online tool designed to identify and report broken links on a website. This tool:

• Checks multiple websites simultaneously.
• Automatically sends reports to users via email.
• Identifies and fixes 404 errors, too-long links, redirect errors, and links to unavailable images.

Pingdom

Source: Pingdom

Pingdom is a service that helps monitor website performance in real-time. It provides real-time information about the website’s availability and performance. Pingdom is a great tool because it can:

• Simulate user interactions with websites. Pingdom helps check the website’s availability, performance, and page loading speed by simulating how users interact with the site.
• Send notifications about problems. If the website stops working, the service will send an SMS notification or an email.
• Allow integration with teamwork services. You can integrate Pingdom with various teamwork platforms, such as Slack, OpsGenie, and PagerDuty for easier collaboration.
• Provide detailed analytics of all website pages. The service will tell you which pages load slower and how to speed them up.
• Monitor transaction speed. The service monitors the speed of transactions, such as how quickly a product is added to the cart, how long it takes to register and pay for a product, etc.

Whether you create your website on your own or work with professionals, remember that every detail matters. A well-designed and user-friendly website is a powerful tool for building trust, increasing engagement, and achieving your business goals.

By combining creativity with technical precision, your website can become a dynamic gateway to success. It shouldn’t only reflect your brand’s values but also inspire action.

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