Table of Contents
Introduction
When users visit any website, it takes them hardly 5-7 seconds to decide whether they want to stay on the website or leave. This implies, your website hardly gets a few seconds to leave a good impression on the visitors.
No matter if you have written long complex code for your website at the backend, if the design is not appealing then no user would stay and get engaged on the website.
A website designer’s job is very challenging, the reason being, designing is a subjective topic, one might find a certain design attractive while the other might find the same design boring and unattractive.
Your website needs an upgrade if your visitors don’t understand the purpose of your website, it has complex navigation, it has an unappealing page layout, or has fonts that are not readable through mobile phones.
There are multiple aspects behind a poor website design that leaves a bad impression on the visitors.
Here are 10 effective tips that can help you create an excellent website
1. Create a simple user-friendly navigation
Navigation is the key while designing a website. It is like a guide that helps the user to navigate throughout the website. There is nothing worse than a website with a complex or confusing navigation interface.
There is no point in building the website if it has vague navigation that the visitors won’t understand and will ultimately leave your website halfway with a huge disappointment.
Always create broad attention-grabbing headlines that can also include specific sub-headings. This will help your website to be organized as well as help your visitors clearly find all sections without any struggles.
Your website design and navigation must be user-friendly, which means it must be easy to use & understand, visitors should be able to easily locate what they were trying to find.
Have a header section where all pages are displayed properly, and also put all the pages and their links in the footer, so the user doesn’t have to scroll to the top again in order to locate other pages of your website.
2. Build a responsive design
Responsive design should be of utmost priority because that will impact how the user’s experience will be. If your website has a responsive design it will adapt according to the device the user is using, be it a desktop or a mobile phone.
A responsive design will keep your visitors engaged regardless of the device they are using. If your website appears like a desktop version on every device, users would struggle with the font size, links, images, etc.
Creating high-end content that gives a unique persona to your brand is equally important along with a good design.
Add a headline on the top of the homepage or other pages so the user is not confused at any given point in time.
Rather than writing a fancy, vague and confusing headline always try to write a simple and appealing headline.
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3. Focus on the SEO of your website
For your website’s success, it is important that it is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) optimized. If your website has a good SEO, your business would attract more traffic and get more opportunities to convert potential customers.
In the search engine page results too, your business would rank higher because a website optimized for conversions typically has good metrics like engagement time of visitors on pages, etc.
Adding targeted keywords in the meta title, meta description, and content of your web pages is a smart move as our website will be more discoverable. When users search terms/keywords related to your business, they will discover your website.
4. Ensure that your website’s loading time is fast
Technology has evolved a lot, people now expect a web page to load within no seconds. No user waits for a slow-loading website, because no one has so much patience, users feel frustrated right away and prefer to click on another website.
If your website takes a long time to load, you will surely lose many visitors.
Factors that majorly affect the speed of a website are huge size images or videos.
You can combine your code into a central CSS file to reduce the HTTP requests.
Optimizing the large images can help to solve loading issues significantly. While your page is loading, don’t keep a blank space, display some message like a loading indicator. Website speed is very important for a good user experience.
To measure your website’s speed and performance you can use the best available tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, which helps you identify the website’s problems and also recommends solutions for specific issues.
5. Make your website mobile-friendly
Whenever we think of a website, we always tend to think of a desktop screen, but the reality is people are more actively browsing the internet on their smartphones, therefore it is very important that your website is mobile optimized.
Smartphones have become very popular and a majority of users are searching for businesses/services through phones. According to a survey, about 83% of internet users own a smartphone, and about 60% of them are disinterested to return to a website they experienced trouble accessing.
If your website is one of these, you might be losing a lot of potential buyers, because they would rather visit a competitor’s website which is easy to access through the phone. In addition to this, if your website is mobile optimized, it is good from an SEO ranking perspective as well.
If the fonts you have used are not readable, your site appearance on small-screen devices is not proper, sections are getting cut-off or images are not getting displayed at the right places all these issues would not give a pleasant experience for your visitors.
The main priority is your website must be user-friendly & appealing, through the desktop or through mobile, whatever screen the users choose, their experience must be good.
6. Add Call-To-Action (CTA) & social share buttons
Many businesses ignore adding a call-to-action on their web pages. A call-to-action button is a prime asset in any website that allows your potential leads to take action. By adding this button you are guiding your visitors to take the final step. The main goal of your business is revenue generation which can be achieved by integrating this button.
Once visitors land on your homepage, you need to place these buttons at accurate places, so that they don’t have to struggle to find anything they are looking for. Examples of CTA buttons are Buy Now, Shop Now, Contact Us, Sign Up, Register Now, etc.
You need to strategically place the CTA’s in places like the top right section of your navigation, below sections that require action, or at the bottom of the web pages.
Along with this, the social share buttons also play a vital role, as social media will help you grow your business network and connect your business to its potential customers.
If your leads are on social media, it is an instant way to connect them to your pages. If they are interested, they can choose to follow your page also. So, in a way, social share icons are a way of growing your business network and for improving the conversions too.
7. Focus on aesthetics and visuals
A picture can speak more than words can. Try to choose the best relevant images for your website, it can help to attract a lot of visitors. Use high-quality images which are optimized so it doesn’t affect the loading speed of your website. There are a lot of sources to get such images or free stock photos.
If there are attention-grabbing images on your website, it helps to clearly convey the message of your content and to keep the visitors interested in your content. Every page must have a visual hierarchy which means using colors, contrast, size, and arrangements that are prominent for grabbing the attention of the human eye.
Web designers use visual hierarchy to get the attention of users to important elements first on the web pages. Due to the visual hierarchy human eye gets guided on a certain path through a page, if this is used intentionally it will keep visitors hooked on your pages.
8. Add client/customer testimonials
Client testimonials add content to your site and help your brand look more valuable and trustable for those users coming to your website for the first time. It shows that your brand is legitimate, so your visitors won’t hesitate to make a purchase.
Along with these reviews and ratings, your services get marketed and your brand is presented to the visitors as a reliable one. One more aspect of adding testimonials is that they improve your brand value by adding a deeper and emotional appeal to your business.
They help significantly to increase the conversion rate of people visiting your website. Adding images/photos next to the testimonials can help to improve the click-through rate.
It is not a very big deal to ask your existing clients to share their experience in brief regarding your company’s services.
9. Keep white spaces in the right places
White spaces are the areas present around elements on a page that are empty and lack content or other visual items, they are also called negative space.
Whitespace is a design element that helps to make your content more appealing and readable, it serves as a breaker in the sections. It is an essential element of the design for positioning the rest website elements.
While more whitespace can guide a user by communicating a separation between two sections, while less white space will tell the elements are related to each other due to their close placements.
If white spaces are used in the right places in an effective way, your website visitors will get engaged on your page for a good amount of time.
10. Fix/Remove broken links
Broken links are the links of the pages that do not exist, have been moved or renamed. It gives a 404 page not found error when users try to click on a broken link.
Whatever the reason is, broken links provide a frustrating experience for the users.
This might not look like a major issue but the impact it has on a website is huge.
A single broken link can impact your search engine rankings, give a bad experience to the visitors on your website, and many missed opportunities in the conversion of leads.
Also, from the crawler’s point of view, if it comes across a broken link, it might stop crawling that page and move to the next one. This implies that the particular page (on which the broken link was present) won’t be indexed and your ranking on search engine results would get affected adversely.
If a user tries clicking on a broken link, he/she could get disinterested from continuing to other pages of your website. In order to improve user experience, all the broken links present on your website must be removed or must be fixed.
Conclusion
To summarize the topic, when the users interact with a website, they expect a pleasant experience. If your website is not user-friendly, visitors would simply switch to a different website, which is just a click away. With all these design tips your website will surely stand out from the competition and attract more visitors.
Are you overwhelmed to try the above-mentioned tips for your official business website?
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