10 Important Things in Website Designing

Last updated: September 2026

Website designing is the work of planning what a site says, how it is structured and how it behaves on every device before a single pixel is styled. For a small Australian business, the ten things that matter most are audience fit, real content, responsive layouts, findable contact details, visual simplicity, reliable hosting, security, easy payments, a clear call to action and ongoing measurement. Get those ten right and the website earns enquiries instead of sitting there as a brochure.

Thinking about a rebuild and not sure where to start? See DigiFix website design services for Australian businesses.

What is website designing?

Website designing is the process of shaping a website’s structure, content, visuals and interactions so that a visitor can find what they need and act on it. It covers the information architecture, the wireframes, the written content, the visual layout and the responsive behaviour across phones, tablets and desktop screens.

Website designing is separate from web development. Designing decides what the site should say and how it should feel, while development writes the code that makes it work.

Why does website design affect Google rankings and enquiries?

Website design affects Google rankings because Google measures the page experience a site delivers, not only the words on the page. Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds, published on web.dev’s Core Web Vitals guidance, set the target at a largest contentful paint of 2.5 seconds or less, an interaction to next paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a cumulative layout shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of real visitors.

Design also decides whether the traffic you already have converts. Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment research, published in 2026 and built from 50 separate studies, puts the average documented online cart abandonment rate at 70.22%. Unbounce reports a median landing page conversion rate of 6.6% across all industries for Q4 2024. The gap between arriving and buying is usually a design problem, not a traffic problem.

Which 10 things matter most in website designing?

These ten decisions cover everything a small business website has to get right. Each is written as the question to ask during planning, so you can work through the list before any design work starts.

1. Does your website match your business and your audience?

Your website has to reflect what the business stands for and who it is talking to. A supermarket site speaks to the general public, a dental clinic speaks to patients in specific suburbs, and a supplier speaks to procurement managers who want specifications rather than lifestyle photography. Write down the age range, location and buying motivation of your main customer before design starts, because those three details decide your page structure, your image style and how much information sits above the fold. Audience fit is the decision every other website designing choice follows from.

2. Is your website content written for people first?

Website content carries the most weight of the ten items on this list, because a design with nothing useful to say converts nobody. Content covers service pages, blog posts, images, product descriptions, downloadable guides and the answers to questions customers ask before they call. Each page should cover one clear topic rather than repeating the same service description across five URLs.

3. Is your website responsive on every screen size?

Responsive design means one website that rearranges itself to suit phones, tablets and desktop screens rather than three separate sites. Most Australian consumers reach a business on a phone first, so the phone layout is the primary design. Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking, which makes mobile first the only sensible order of work: large tap targets, readable text without pinching and no horizontal scrolling.

4. Can visitors find the essential information they came for?

Essential information means the details a customer needs to act today: your phone number, service area, opening hours, address, map and a short description of what you do. Put contact details in the header and the footer and make them tappable on mobile. When those details are buried a menu deep, the visitor leaves and calls the next business.

5. Is your website design simple and easy to look at?

Simple website designing gives each page one job and removes everything that competes with it. Visitors form an opinion in a few seconds, and clutter, auto-playing video, pop ups that fire instantly and low contrast colour schemes all shorten that window further. A practical test: hide the page and ask what the one thing it wants the visitor to do is. If that is not obvious, the page needs fewer elements rather than a new colour scheme. One page, one job.

6. Is your website’s backend reliable enough to stay online?

The backend is the hosting, database and software layer that keeps a website loading. Australian hosting, regular updates and a staging environment for changes prevent the outages that stop customers contacting you at the moment they were ready to buy. Large uncompressed images, extra plugins and heavy page builders slow every page load, and the Core Web Vitals thresholds cannot be met on poor hosting, however clean the design looks.

7. Is your website secure enough to earn trust?

Website security covers an SSL certificate, an up to date platform, strong administrator passwords and a backup routine. If a website takes payments or stores customer details, security stops being optional, because Australian privacy law sets obligations for how personal information is held and protected.

8. Can customers pay you without friction?

Payment friction is where most ecommerce revenue leaks. The Baymard Institute average of 70.22% cart abandonment means roughly seven in ten shoppers who start a checkout do not finish it. Forced account creation, unclear delivery costs and long forms are among the usual causes, so show shipping costs before the final step and let guests check out without registering.

9. Does every page have a clear call to action?

A call to action is the specific next step you want a visitor to take, stated in a button or link rather than assumed. Common examples are book a consultation, request a quote, call now or download the price guide. Place one primary call to action in each section of a long page, keep the wording action led and specific, and never make a promise your business cannot control.

10. Are you measuring what the website actually does?

Measurement means tracking sessions, enquiries, calls and sales so you can tell which pages earn money. Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console are free and cover traffic sources, queries and conversions without paid tooling. Set up conversion tracking before launch, because without a baseline there is no way to prove a redesign helped.

How do you choose between a template, a custom build and an agency?

The right build type depends on how much control you need over structure, speed and ongoing changes. A template gets a small site online quickly, while a custom build costs more upfront and is usually faster to change later.

What does a website design project look like for a Melbourne business?

Consider a cafe in Clayton with steady local trade but no website. Customers search the cafe name on their phones and find only an outdated social page with no menu, no opening hours and no way to book a function.

DigiFix would start with discovery in week one, covering the suburb’s search demand, the menu and the function booking process. Weeks two and three go into page structure and written content, weeks four to six into design and build with speed testing, then launch and measurement from week seven. The cost of doing nothing is quiet: the cafe keeps losing function enquiries to a competitor with a bookable page, and it has no data showing how many people searched for it and left. DigiFix is a Melbourne digital agency based in Clayton, and you can read more about the DigiFix team.

1. Discovery in week one. Review search demand, nearby competitors, the services that earn the most and the way customers currently enquire.
2. Structure and content in weeks two to three. Map the page hierarchy, write the service pages and plan the calls to action before any visual work.
3. Design and build in weeks four to six. Build the mobile layout first, then desktop, and test page speed against the Core Web Vitals thresholds.
4. Launch and measurement from week seven. Publish, submit the site to Google Search Console and set up conversion tracking so enquiries can be counted.

How do you tell whether your website is working?

Run this self assessment against your own website. Answer each question honestly and note the ones you cannot answer, because those are the gaps a retrofit should fix first.

Where can you read more about website design?

To go deeper before briefing a designer, you can browse every article on the DigiFix blog.

• How to build an SEO friendly website structure
• The ultimate ecommerce website design guide
• Key elements of a good website
• How to optimise your website content

What are the most common questions about website designing?