A website serves as the digital gateway to any business. Over 80% of people who find your website through search engines and social media tend to visit your website. If you fail to capture their expectation, imagination, and need, then you'll fail as a marketer.
A great website design is a key to achieving more website visits and inquiries and seeing the growth in sales and revenue in the long run. This can only be achieved when you fix your website
Experts say that you only have 5-seconds to make an impression. The question that comes to the mind of every website owner is that How can I achieve it?
Well, here are some useful tips to help improve your website design.
10 Best Tips to Improve your Website Design
Improving your website design doesn't necessarily mean revamping the entire design; it means that you need to improve on different aspects of design (Ui/UX), information (content), and communication (contacts, inquiry box).
Have a plan
Great things always start with a plan. Microsoft wasn’t built in a day nor was it built outside the plan. When it comes to designing a successful website, you’d need to plan every step carefully and conduct different tests to assess if you’re going the right way.
- Define your goals
- Define your communications
- Define your challenges
For most of us, our goal from a website is to get more traffic and sales. When it comes to communication, you should establish different communication channels like social media, website chat, contact forms, etc. The challenges of any website are accessibility and search engine rankings. To make it accessible, you'd need to design a mobile-friendly website. For better search engine rankings, you'd need to focus on SEO.
Mobile-Friendly and Responsive
There's really no argument about this. A website must be responsive to different screen sizes, devices, and browsers. It's more likely that 9 out of 10 people looking at your website from a mobile device.
More than 70% of Americans own a smartphone and over 80% of smartphone users choose to shop online.
If you fail to grasp smartphone users, you'd fail as a business.
A responsive website can be accessed through any device or screen without any distortion of any kind. Moreover, a responsive website design focuses on presenting your website in a more interactive format for smartphone users so that they can stay engaged with it.
Revamp your content
Content is the King! This is true because content can either make or break the deal. Content stands for everything on a website that speaks to the customer. It can either be in a textual format or multi-media.
Why is it important? It’s important because content drives the success of a website. Avoid adding complicated, long, and muddled content to your webpages. Avoid unnecessary animations, don't overuse colors to highlight your text, find a good balance between text and white space so it's easy for the eyes. And most of all, write relevant content with an intention of answering questions. This will not only help website visitors but also improves your ranking in search engines.
Social Sharing
Everything successful we see on the internet has a lot to thank for social media. You'd need to encourage your website visitors to share your content and to do so you need social sharing buttons.
Adding a social sharing button on your webpages can motivate your website visitors to share about it on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media sites.
Any website improvement ideas should involve taking advantage of social sharing and social following. Why? There are 800 million monthly active users on Instagram and 100 million daily active users on Twitter.
Help your website get more traction and gain more website visitors.
Strong and Visible Call to Action
Make sure you have a strong and visible call to action on your website. Give your site visitors a way to connect with your company. Call-to-action is one of the many elements that indicate your users to take the next step such as sign-up for a newsletter, sign-up for a free trial, etc.
Some great examples of high converting calls to action are
- Click here for more information.
- Download our sample xxx.
- Sign up for a webinar.
- Watch the video.
- See all marketing services.
- See pricing.
Your Call to Action must be visible and different so it stands out. Consider using banners, buttons, popup box that grabs your site visitor's attention.
Don't mess with White Space
White space, also called negative space, is an empty area in your webpage. White space is basically called white space because it contains nothing.
Use white space to your advantage. A web page should have an optimum amount of white space to balance the blank space and content ratio. This will greatly complement the 'User Experience'
If your website lacks white space, then you should review the layout and strip the content or design to create more white space.
Search Engine Optimization
Although we're mentioning SEO as the seventh point in this list, its implication is the largest among all the points listed.
SEO is the key to get your website to your audience. It helps to get good rankings in search engines, get more traffic, nurture your site visitors, expand your marketing outreach, and more.
There are hundreds of different aspects that you need to look into website optimization. Moreover, your website should follow the necessary quality compliances. By saying that, you aren't supposed to optimize your website for search engines but your audience. Target your audience, the search engine rankings will follow.
Identify Unknown 404s or Broken Links
Depending on the size of your website, or how long it’s been around, you may actually have a few pages or links that aren’t working. Also called 404 errors, this sign pops up whenever you click a link that doesn't exist.
This can be a great bummer to your site visitors who are looking for relevant information. Moreover, 404 pages can land you in trouble when it comes to Google search rankings. Google has strict compliance against 404 pages.
Take the time to evaluate whether or not your site has broken pages. You may be surprised to find previously high performing landing pages that are unpublished or website pages that are improperly linked. You can use Google's Webmaster tool to identify and correct these broken links.
Start Blogging
If you haven't started blogging yet, this is the time to start doing it.
A blog ensures that you have fresh and relevant contents to offer to your audience.
There are many ways you can start blogging. One of the best ways is to start a blog on your website. This can really help serve fresh content to both site visitors and Google Search Engine. The search engine will find fresh content to index.
You can opt to blog outside your website through different blogging platforms like Medium.com or Linkedin's Pulse and guest blogging platforms.
The key is to keep producing fresh content for your audience.
Use Color Theory
If you're just starting to build a new website or thinking about revamping your old website, then you should definitely consider looking into the color theory.
Colors have a great way of telling stories or communicating with site visitors. People often opt out of webpages that are painted with thick and greasy colors because they're hard to eyes. Choose colors wisely and keep the palette minimal.
To help you a little, here is what colors represent:
Red: passion, anger, love, confidence
Orange: youthfulness, cheer, warmth, hunger
Yellow: sunshine, happiness, energy, optimism
Green:nature, fertility, balance, cleanliness
Blue: water, tranquility, trust, power
Purple:nobility, power, elegance, wisdom
White:peace, balance, purity, simplicity, winter
Gray: neutral, sophistication, balance, wisdom
Black: exclusivity, modern, power, sophistication, mystery
Brown: earth, stability, tradition, nature
Pink: love, romance, femininity, baby girls, humanistic
Turquoise: tranquility, clarity, compassion, healing
In conclusion, you shouldn’t believe that your website is perfect. Even a perfect website can become obsolete at one point in time. You’d need to keep testing your website against the time and keep improving on important aspects.
Searchable Design LLC is the Best Web Development Agency in the USA. We specialize in designing and developing responsive websites for all types of small and medium businesses.