10 Essential Tips for Improving Your Web Design
Websites are an essential element of any company’s online marketing strategy, and if you’re serious about being successful, your company’s website should reflect that. But what makes a website stand out from its competitors?
Visitors to your website should be able to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for, content should be updated regularly and be interesting enough to encourage users to revisit the site, and if they’re making a purchase or an inquiry, then the process needs to be smooth and simple.
However, if a website is successful in attracting visitors but isn’t so successful at converting them into potential customers, then the bounce rate needs to be addressed. Confusing layouts, a lack of clear information, unappealing designs or slow loading rates can all contribute to this problem.
If your website isn’t doing as well as you’d like it to, then these 10 Essential Tips for Improving Your Web Design may help you enhance your users experience and convert visitors to customers:
1. Plan your website well
Even before you begin designing your website, think carefully about what kind of experience you want your visitors to have, and what their requirements may be. Converting visits into sales is much more achievable if each and every page of your website is visually appealing, engaging, and accurate, and if you’re not sure what this entails, check out your competitors sites and see what you can learn from them (not copy!).
2. Make navigation the focal point
When a user has trouble finding what they’re looking for on your site, it will take them no more than a few minutes before they give up and go elsewhere. Ensuring that your site is easy to use and navigate, can help retain visitors and encourage them to make a purchase or engage in your services.
Successful navigation should include –
- Streamlined content
- Hierarchy of navigation
- Responsive design
It’s also important to ensure that the site is adaptable for all platforms, so that the user experience never alters.
3. Ensure your website is mobile friendly and responsive
Priority should be given to making your website mobile-friendly and responsive, as up to 80% of all users nowadays.
- Mobile-Friendly Website is when your website can be viewed properly on any mobile device.
- Responsive is when your site responds to screen size and browser choice and displays accurately on all devices.
4. Utilize white space
White space is also known as negative space and is an essential element of website design. Helping you to break up a page, when used effectively in between text and images, it can give site users a much better reading experience. When a site will be cluttered and crowded, users can easily become distracted or confused, and ultimately, this can have a devastating impact on your bounce rate and conversion potential.
5. Have a solid SEO strategy
If you want your website to quickly and easily be found, then you need a strong SEO strategy. Content needs to be appropriate for your target audience, and contain such things as videos, blog articles, images, and e-books.
6. Ensure your homepage delivers
With a homepage that has 3-5 different sections, you can help direct new and recurring visitors to the area of your site. Appropriate use of the following elements should help you achieve this:
Value proposition
- Logo
- Brand information
- Team and video introductions
- Mission statement
- Overview of services
- Product features
- Contact details
- Customer testimonials, case studies or success stories
When visitors are directed to your website, they should know within a matter of minutes, what you’re selling or offering as a service, and be able to reach out to you should they need to.
7. Call to action
A call to action, or CTA, is a statement in the form of a banner, pop-up box or similar function that should immediately garner the interest of website visitors and encourage them to make an appropriate response. Here are just some examples of CTA’s with a high conversion success rate:
- Invite for a free trial
- Account creating
- Click here for more information
- Download sample
- Sign up for a webinar
- Sign up for newsletter
- Watch the video
- Check all marketing services
- Click here for pricing
A creative, colorful and functional CTA, that gives the visitor exactly what it promises, will work wonders for conversion rate.
8. Add a blog
Blogs, provided they’re interesting, accurate, target focused and regularly updated, can boost your SEO opportunities and give value to your website by providing visitors with additional information. When well written and informative, blogs can demolish bounce rates, and encourage users not only to remain on the site for longer, but to recommend your site to others.
9. Use of social media buttons
Social sharing is big news nowadays, and if you don’t maximize this on your website, you’re likely to fall behind your competitors. Simply by using social media buttons, you can help visitors to quickly and easily share your content with others, driving your conversion rate skyward.
10. Avoid using unnecessary content
Less is often more when it comes to website design, and a crowded site with visual content that jostles for the visitor’s attention, can be hugely distracting and do nothing to help your bounce rate. Eliminating some of the following, can help give you a clearer, more polished and visually appealing website:
- Complicated animations
- Long, jumbled text
- Chunky web images
- Overuse of colors
De-cluttering your website will also help increase its speed, so along with optimizing the images, deactivate all unnecessary plugins that may hinder the user. You can also minify HTML, JavaScript, or CSS codes without altering their functionality, with the removal of unnecessary characters. Improved load speed on a website is perhaps one of the best ways to maximize its potential and keep bounce rates to a minimum.
Conclusion
With the speed at which digital trends are changing, if you want your website to attract a bigger, better audience, and stay one step ahead of your competitors, then you need to invest a little in improving it.
If your website is long overdue an upgrade, why not let us help you?