Your website is the first chance to give a good first impression when someone finds you online. If you give someone a bad first experience, it could put potential customers off from buying from your company.
In fact, 48% of people said that a website’s designed played an essential role in determining the credibility of a business. You can’t get away with skimping on design anymore.
The good news is that there are several web design tips available that will help make your site look great. Find out what they are below.
1. Simplify Things
Have you ever gone to a website where you were overloaded with information and didn’t know where to start? You probably didn’t like the experience.
Guess what? Your visitors won’t like it either.
Instead of trying to overwhelm your visitors, keep things as simple as possible. Give your visitors only the information they need to know. Your website should be clear about what it is and the value that it provides someone for going there.
2. Use Colors Correctly
Have you ever wondered why businesses use the color layouts that they do? Here’s a hint… it isn’t random.
There is a lot of testing that has gone into color theory. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s the science of how colors affect people and how we can use them to invoke action in people.
If you want to make the most use out of colors, learn what a potential customer needs to feel before buying your products. Use your colors to try to connect with that emotion.
3. Create a Responsive Layout
Mobile internet use isn’t going down in the future. If anything, it will go up more.
You can cater to these people by creating a responsive website. Instead of having one layout for your site, your site will change based on the screen size of the device accessing it. A responsive design will allow you to create smooth user experiences for people who are using your website with small screens.
If you’re looking for a company that can help you with a responsive layout, this service can give you what you’re looking for.
4. Make Navigation Simple
If you want your visitors to leave your website as soon as they get there, giving them a complicated navigation bar is one of the ways to do it. You can’t just throw everything in your website navigation and call it a day. You need a plan that will help guide your visitors to find the information that they’re looking for.
Your navigation menu should include the most critical pages on your website. If you have a lot of content, then be careful about cluttering the menu up with too many links. It’s harder to design and can provide a bad experience for people visiting your site on mobile devices.
5. Find Your 404 Pages
Every once and a while, a piece of content becomes outdated and not useful anymore. When that happens, your first instinct may be to delete the page. That’s fine, but you also need to consider the other pages on your site that are linking to your deleted page.
If your visitors can still get to that page with a link somewhere, they’ll get a 404 error. That’s not a great user experience.
To get around this, you’ll need to remove or change all the links on your site that point to your page. Another option is to redirect that page to a relevant one. Doing this will give your visitors somewhere to go instead of seeing a 404 error.
6. Use Call to Actions
Getting a great website up and running is only the first step. If your site is meant to make you money, then putting time and money into a good design is pointless if you don’t tell your visitors what you want them to do.
This is why a call to action is useful. Your blog posts and other content is meant to prime your visitors to take action. Once they’re ready, your call to action will get them to make a purchase, sign up for an email list, give you a call, or whatever it is that you want.
7. Don’t Forget SEO Optimization
Making your site look nice for visitors is great, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have visitors. That’s where SEO comes into play.
SEO is the process of optimizing your website for Google and other search engines. It tells search engines what your site is about, which helps you rank higher in search engines. Make sure you put time into this process for your pages, so you give people a chance to find your site.
8. Optimize Page Load Times
With mobile internet use on the rise, you can’t rely on fast internet connections to deliver your content. Because of this, you need to take the time to reduce your page sizes so that those slow internet connections can load your website quickly.
You can do this by minimizing your website code, compressing your images, and lazy loading images that aren’t on the top of your pages. This will help speed your site up, so your visitors aren’t waiting for your content to load.
9. Never Stop Testing
You’re already most of the way there if you have a great design in place that your visitors love. But a common mistake people make is stopping at that.
There is always something there that you can improve on, so always have a testing plan in place to help you optimize your site. A common method is installing a heatmap onto your website. A heatmap will tell you what your visitors are doing when on your page, so you can learn what changes you implement lead to the best results.
Put These Web Design Tips Into Practice
You don’t need a big budget to improve your web design. If you use the web design tips above, you should be able to make changes that will have a big impact on the look of your site. Make sure to put them into practice so you can see how much of an impact a better design has.
Once you improve your design and get new visitors, you need to convert them into customers. Head to our digital marketing section for tips that can help you do that.
