When designing your website sooner or later this question arises: “do we like it?”. If you present your new design for your site to ten different people, you will probably hear ten different opinions. And that can make you feel short of breath.

It's not about “pretty”, it's about the plan

As far as we are concerned, we are taking the sting out of the problem here. When you start working on a new design for your website, it is especially important that there is a good plan behind it. Whether it is beautiful is subjective and secondary to the plan.

In the phase where you... strategy for your website determine what goals you want to achieve with your new site. You then work with the designers to determine which design is best suited to achieving those goals. It is of course important that your website is “on brand” and that the style matches your brand and company. But if others don't find the site 'nice', try talking to them to find out whether they think the website is 'effective'. That's actually more relevant.

Asking a lot of people around you whether the website is 'nice' is actually not a good idea. Everyone always finds something iets not nice about your site and that is completely logical. Listen carefully to feedback and check whether it sheds a different light on your plan and goals.

Your site must be right, but don't pay too much attention to the pixels

You create a design for your site, or you have had a design made, and you love it. When the site is live, place the original Photoshop file next to it. And what do you see? That here and there elements are slightly larger or smaller than in the design.

Is that bad?

We don't think so ourselves. Pixel perfect design depends on many things, such as a good delivery and a design that meets the correct specifications. Elements often cannot be delivered pixel-perfect, because your website must also be displayed properly on mobile devices.

Don't get us wrong, the design of your site must of course be right. If two elements are next to each other in the design and on the live site they are below each other, then that is of course not correct. But if an element in your design is 22px wide, and on your live site it is 20px then that is an acceptable difference.

The only one who sees this difference is you. The user doesn't even notice it, he or she doesn't know any better. And more importantly, the website achieves the goals you set in it strategy- en design phase have stated. Those few pixels that are wrong are not going to make that difference. Keep a close eye on whether you are achieving your goals with your site. If not, take a critical look at the design and see where you can optimize things.

Tips for rolling out a new design

It can happen to anyone: you create a new design for your website, you think it is absolutely fantastic and you are sure that it has become much more beautiful and therefore better. You launch your new design and… your traffic halves. Or your conversion drops by alarming numbers. In an article in the Financieel Dagblad of December 22, 2019, you can read how this happened to Loes Daniels from Hotelgift.

Caution is therefore advised when launching your new website, especially when a large part of your turnover depends on it. Below are a few tips to ensure that the rollout of your new design goes as smoothly as possible.

• Test your design in advance: you can test your design among the target group. In a lab setting, you can quite easily give respondents a task on your new site (or a prototype thereof) to test your stated goals. Are you not achieving those goals? Then you know exactly what you need to adjust in your design to achieve those goals.
• Roll out in small steps: when you want to implement a new design, start small. If you operate in multiple countries, roll out your new design to one country first and see if you're happy with the results. Then roll out the design to other countries.
• Work with A/B tests: are you not yet completely sure about certain things in your new design? Then you can if you website is live and can perform A/B tests. You can then design certain parts of your website differently to see if there is a difference in conversion, for example. Also download our free whitepaper about A/B testing.