7 Tips For Great Web Design
Are you thinking about designing a new website for your business? You are not alone. According to the latest statistics on Millforbusiness.com, over 375 new websites are created every minute. When you begin to count up these numbers, that’s about 547,200 more sites added to the mix every day. Though you may have already guessed it, you should also know that your new website will be up against huge amounts of competition.
That said, if you want your business site to leverage the competition, here are 7 great web design tips that can help meet and exceed the requirements of the user and big search engines like Google.
7 Tips For Great Web Design
1. Grab Your Audience's Attention by Giving Them the Best Impression
Your visitor's first impression of your business is usually determined by the design of your web site. As a general rule of thumb, it only takes a few seconds to grab the audience's attention or lose their attention altogether.
To avoid giving a bad first impression of your business, you need a site that is not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye but also easy to navigate from one section or page on your site to the next. Therefore, you need a well thought out web design that has been tested (A/B testing) for likeability before deploying live. Also, since you may only get once chance at making a good impression, you need to do your very best the first time.
2. Seek to Make Your Site Search Engine and Web Crawler Friendly
Before you get started on your web design, you need to become familiar with the major search engines and their design features. You need to understand what it means to create specific designs for web crawlers.
If you do not take this into consideration, you may make it impossible for web crawlers to read your website’s code. For instance, you need to make sure that you have configured your site properly. This part of the design process can be achieved by making flash objects web crawler friendly.
As you create your designs, you need to know which coding languages are considered to be the best of SEO rankings. If you do not have this knowledge, you can easily compromise your site’s high rankings in the search engine. For instance, Javascript and CSS can help you to develop an effective design that meets the search engine rankings requirements.
3. Boost Your Conversions by Limiting the User's Choice
As mentioned earlier, you need to know how a website should be written and configured for specific things in your design. One of the most essential is determining how to get the user to do what you want them to do, and within the timeframe that is allowed. In order to be effective in this area, you need to make sure that you are limiting the user’s capabilities to choose.
Limiting the user's choice is simply a matter of designing your site with the following requirements in mind.
- Limit the number of menu items that the user has access to.
- Reduce the number form field sections.
- Only give the user one call to action to respond to.
- Only display active networks that are engaging in. This will reduce the number of social buttons that lead to specific networks.
- Only focus on one goal for each page.
4. Incorporate SEO Marketing Campaign in Web Design
The site that you build for your business is not only meant to look good when visitors enter your site. The best sites are designed with marketing campaigns that promote your brand. Therefore, when you are designing your site, you may need to hire a digital marketing specialist that knows how to incorporate and deploy a tried and proven successful SEO strategy.
The campaign that is set-up on the site will make it easy for digital marketing specialists will make it easy to perform the following.
- Track and Define Your Goals.
- Utilize Keyword Research and Topic Creation.
- Set up a Pillar Content Strategy.
- Optimize the site for Local Seo.
- Incorporate Back Links.
- Analyze the Current Site’s Setup.
- Perform an SEO Audit.
All of these things and more can help you to design a site that will assist you in driving more organic traffic to the site and will assist in converting leads to customers.
5. Prioritize Speed at the Top
The days of waiting on your site to come up are long gone. If you want to lose customers or destroy your brand and your company’s online credibility, all you have to do is deploy a site that is too slow to do conduct business. This is because users are expecting to make their purchases quickly by adding products to the shopping cart, verifying the purchase for accuracy and then checking out with their credit or debit card.
While this is the perfect way to get a lot of sales, slow loading pages on the site will not only make the buyer rethink their purchase, they may also try to cancel the order before it is completed. This is because no one likes to wonder if they will lose their product or the money that they are paying because of hung up transactions that freeze. So, the speed of your site should be a high priority and must be taken care of before the site is launched live to the consumer. In short, speed is paramount to the success of any business site.
6. Don’t Forget Basic Business Practices in Your Design — Keep It Simple
When you are designing your new website, you will most likely discover that there are a lot of extra cute bells and whistles that can be used to create your designs. Dancing images, interesting flyby graphic lettering and a host of other things that can make your site unique. Though you may want your site to stand out from the crowd and leave an impression that they can’t forget, you want that impression to be positive.
To make sure the impression is good, you need to keep it simple so that your users do not get distracted by too much hoopla going on in the background. For instance, if you are designing a business site to conduct business, the site needs to be designed as such. Simply put, the complex designs that look fun and exciting but not intuitive for the user can quickly kill the effectiveness of your marketing plan and your sales.
7. Test Your Site Before Going Live
After you have completed your design, you need to test your site (A/B testing) to see how your site performs. There is a wide range of tests that you can do to ensure your site will be successful. For instance, you can do a design test to find out if the colors of the CTA (call to action) button will give you the best Click through rates.
Final Verdict
If you want to design a successful site, it is important that you do your research well in advance. The research that you do will help you to save time, money and re-work. The web design strategy that you choose can help with a number of essential needs, including driving more visitors to your site, promoting your brand with effective digital marketing techniques, increase your site's ranking in major search engines like Google, and allow you to test the performance of the site before it goes live on the web.
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- Why Website Design is Important for Business, SMA Marketing.
- Top 10 Reasons SEO Web Design is Important for Business Success, Lyfe Marketing.
- The Importance Of Website Design An, Code Burst. d How It Helps In Making Business Profitable