This article will cover everything you need to know about website design, from modern website design to search engine optimization (SEO). Designing a website for your business is a top priority in reaching your market today. Online competition is fierce and companies are always looking for new ways to stand out. It’s important that your website is designed to be aligned with industry best practices and trends.
Table of Contents:
- Modern Website Design
- Be Minimalistic
- Typography Makes A Difference
- Full Page Header
- Gradients Still Trending
- Incorporate Borders
- Video
- Illustrations
- Website Design Ideas & Best Practices
- User Experience
- Branding
- Focused CTA Above The Fold
- Security
- Webpage Load Times
- Blog / Content Marketing
- Mobile Friendly / Responsive Web Design
- Social Media Integration
- Off-Page SEO
- Google Business Listing
- Review Sites
- Testimonials
- Tracking & Analytics
- Website Search Engine Optimization
Modern Website Design
Don’t just create a beautiful website. Create a website with the intent of your customers in focus. Your website’s design should aid the primary goal of your website. Is it an e-commerce site? The website should help visitors to make purchases. Is it a brochure or an information site? Then the website’s appearance should allow users to locate what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
There are numerous components to website design, including color palettes, forms, and functionality. Many variables affect how successful a website is at bringing visitors to the site’s ultimate goal. Designing an effective website may assist to increase visitors’ confidence and encourage them to take action. It’s more critical than ever to create a good user experience on your website and a contemporary design that is optimized for simple use.
The following is a rundown of the most useful best practices for planning your next website project.
Be Minimalistic
Modern sites are not cluttered, like those from the 90s. Rather, they use appropriate white space to help guide the eye to where they want the user to go. Graphics, full width banners, or other graphical elements can be used to help break up the site into logical sections, while still encouraging users to continue scrolling.
Typography Makes A Difference
If your header or headline text is hard to read, people won’t. They’ll just bounce. Good clean typography that is interesting but easy to read is critical to good website design that converts. On that note, make sure your typography color stands out from the background. That’s one of the most common mistakes that we see, where the header text blends into whatever background it’s over. There has to be contrast in order to read it – otherwise it’s a missed opportunity.
Full Page Header
Modern websites will often use full width banners above the fold (before you have to scroll). Along with these large “hero images”, are a clear “call to action”, typically to the left of the image subject. This is because the human eye (in English speaking countries) naturally wants to start at the top/left. This naturally encourages users to see the call to action and purpose of the site, right from the start.
Users must immediately understand the purpose of the site, as one really only has a couple of seconds before they decide if they want to continue into the site, or “bounce” and hit the back button.
Gradients Still Trending
Gradients as a design element have been popular lately, and they’re still going strong. Because gradients feature numerous hues, they’re simple to incorporate into the website design of any brand.
Incorporate Borders
In the past, web design seemed to hang everything out there in space and stayed away from showing many borders at all. Modern web design has embraced the use of borders and incorporates it into the design. It’s ok to have borders, both vertically or horizontally, (or even diagonal).
Video
According to Wordstream, after watching branded social videos, 64% of customers will buy something. That figure alone should persuade every company to start producing more videos! You’re simply falling behind if you aren’t employing video in your marketing plan.
Illustrations
Illustrated web design, which is simply using an illustration vs using an actual photo, has some distinct advantages. First, file sizes tend to be smaller with illustrations which can lead to faster page load times and improved user experience scores. Second, illustrations can be easier to come by. A company doesn’t have to hire a photographer, models, location, etc to get marketing collateral. Rather, they can create exactly what they need through a good illustration.
Website Design Ideas & Best Practices
There are many different website design concepts that may significantly improve the success of a website. Implement these concepts properly, and you can expect your website to perform well with Google, improving your chances of ranking high and obtaining valuable visitors that could become paying customers. Do these things poorly, and your website could be relegated to Google’s search rankings dungeon – unseen by your target audience.
Here is our list of key website design ideas to use in your website development:
User Experience
UX (also known as user experience) refers to a person’s or company’s experience and interactions with it, particularly online. There are many elements that influence user experience. Some of the factors that make up a user’s experience are:
- Ease of use
- Relevance of content
- Credibility
- Value
- Accessibility
- Fast page load
- Scannable content
- Multimedia
The first, and most important reason to focus on these things is that they have a direct influence on the website’s conversion rate. Google now incorporates User Experience into its search algorithm, so websites with excellent UX will rank higher in search results.
Branding
A simple definition of branding is: “A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or service as distinct from those of other sellers” (American Marketing Association).
The attractiveness of branding is that you might have two similar items, but the branded product may be purchased for a greater price. Consider cell phones as an example. A new off-brand phone may be purchased for $300. However, Apple has set their prices at $800 per device. Create a brand and expect your conversion rates to increase!
Focused CTA Above The Fold
The term “CTA” refers to a call to action on a website. On the internet, these are generally buttons or elements that visitors may interact with on a website. They are the actions that you want users to take in order to get them to convert. CTAs are one of the most crucial aspects of your website design, with many businesses getting it wrong, resulting in lower sales.
“Above the Fold” is a term from the heyday of newspapers. The front page, which is visible before anything else and encourages sales and reading the narrative, or not, is what people see first when they look at a newspaper.
In other words, your website is just as important. Your “front page” is the region of your website that visitors see before they scroll down. This area will either entice visitors to scroll down or interact with your call-to-actions, or they will simply click the back button and leave your site. There are certain elements that may be incorporated into your website design to assist this vital aspect of your website achieve results for your company.
Security
Google has placed a lot of emphasis on website security recently. Basically, if your site does not have an SSL (security certificate) that shows it to be safe to visit, Google may not display it at all! Instead, the user will receive a warning that your site is “unsafe”, which isn’t what you want when people are looking for you!
Webpage Load Times
The amount of time it takes for a website to be accessible is referred to as webpage load times. Users will frequently abandon a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load, but the best sites will load in under 2 seconds!
Webpage load times are an important aspect of conversion.
Portent found that “Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5).” When a company understands this, they act quickly to guarantee that their website is optimized for quick load times.
Blog / Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the main factors to help users find your website. However, you must build your content strategy on sound SEO research. You run the danger of failing to reach your maximum potential if you only do one or the other. Inquire about how we may achieve this in a successful manner!
Mobile Friendly / Responsive Web Design
Google has said that more than 50% of web searches happen on a mobile device, and it’s only expected to increase! Google now weighs mobile compatibility into their search algorithm as well, and gives preference to sites with mobile optimized sites.
That is one reason why it is important to design your website using responsive layouts that will work on any screen size. So if your site isn’t mobile friendly/responsive, then Google could push your site down the list of search results.
Social Media Integration
Many companies’ marketing approaches now incorporate social media. Understanding the data on this subject is critical, so you know how much money to devote to it. For some firms, social marketing is a significant opportunity, and not implementing it on your website would be a mistake.
Nonetheless, for some companies, they may be shocked at how little return on investment their social media provides. For a business, it can go either way. Allow us to assist you in determining this and give a recommendation.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page considerations include other websites that could possibly contribute credibility or take away credibility from your website. There are a number of examples of this on review sites like Yelp, as well as Google Business Listings.
Google Business Listing
Businesses may be listed online by Google in order to be discovered via the search engine. This is usually associated with “Local SEO,” or local company listings on Google. To help you find the best company in X City, we use structured and keyword rich questions and comments to improve your results. This helps when individuals talk on their phone and ask, “What’s the finest business in X City?” or “What is x near me?” Google will check their database and, if your company appears to be relevant to the user’s search query, you could appear at the top of results.
These queries are particularly beneficial since the user is most likely to buy at that time. You would want to make sure that your business is listed with Google.
Review Sites
The Better Business Bureau (BBB), Yelp, Trustpilot, and many more services are frequently utilized to get a sense of what others have experienced with a firm. It’s critical to pay attention to what customers have said about you and respond if needed.
Testimonials
Testimonials can be a helpful tool for getting others to use your service. They lend legitimacy to your business and might be the key to converting a user into a customer.
Tracking & Analytics
The objective of marketing analytics is to increase return on investment (ROI). To do so, you must first have a firm grasp on your marketing success and its consequences. You need data in addition to the metrics themselves; otherwise, the data would be meaningless.
Analyzing the data will allow you to place it in its proper setting so that you may utilize it for future marketing recommendations. Market analytics is the science of collecting and analyzing data on your marketing techniques in order to assist your future marketing decisions. It also aids in the growth of your ROI. This goes beyond just having a default Google Analytics installed on your site. That’s a good start, but it falls short of giving businesses the information they really need.
Website Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The acronym “SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of optimizing a website’s visibility in search engine results in order to increase the number of visitors to it. This might refer to either the amount or quality of traffic.
The quantity of visitors that your website receives is determined by a variety of factors, such as the amount of time users spend on your site and how long they stay once there. By optimizing your site in certain ways that make it more appealing to Google – such as ranking it higher in search results – SEO may improve the quantity of traffic.
SEO may also improve the quality of visitors to your website. This is significant because the greater the quality of traffic, the more of your target audience sees your website. Not all traffic is created equal. As a result, if more people click on your site vs those who aren’t in your target demographic, you have a better chance converting them into customers
The design of your website has a big influence on how well it ranks in search engines and how many people end up becoming customers.
Conclusion
Your website’s design will either make your website an expense or an asset. It’s an expenditure if it doesn’t bring in new consumers for you and just costs money to maintain. When it starts to produce marketing leads for your business that result in customers, it becomes an asset.
Contact us today for a free consultation to help you design your website to be a lead generating machine that provides long-term revenue and profits.
