Helpful Tips & Tricks for Great Web Design
When putting together a website for a small business, people often find it difficult to justify hiring a web designer. Since budgets for start-ups are generally on the lower end, most owners don’t want to spend the money on design.
However, that’s a huge mistake. If web design isn’t a priority, you won’t compete effectively on the grand scale. We’ve entered the digital age; it’s time to embrace it!
Unless you’re going to put in the time to learn the ins and outs of creating a beautiful interface to enhance the user experience, you’re likely to hurt your website in the long-run. If the site is confusing, buggy, and inconsistent, you’ll harm your reputation and dissuade users from making a purchase.
Direction, Inc. provides quality business web design for both company and organization websites. Today, we’re offering you a free guide to the essential elements of strong web design and why it matters for your company.
Here are the top 6 aspects you should look for developing powerful web design:
1 – Easy-to-Follow Navigation
One of the most important aspects of effective web design is a site that is easy and intuitive to follow. Whether or not your site is easy to navigate can make or break your design, especially with larger, more complex websites.
When a site is difficult to use, users are more likely to leave your site to go to another that is more simple and straightforward. In addition to users frustration, a poor design also makes it less likely for Google to crawl your site.
In response to search queries, Google recommends websites that are fast and easy to use. You need quality content, but if no one can find it, it’s useless. Thus, Google penalizes web pages with poor navigation practices are pushes them lower in results. Thus, having a website with poor hierarchy will likely result in fewer visitors to your site.
So, what does good navigation look like for you? It may depend on the purpose and scope of your company website, but you should include a consistent and logical header menu on all pages. This menu should provide the key structure for your whole site. For example, you might have standard menu categories like:
- Home
- Services
- Locations
- About
- Employment
- Blog
You can include subcategories that break these down or a specific sidebar navigation menu for specific types of pages. Whatever you decide, make sure it’s consistent and points visitors directly to relevant pages. Make the menu visible and inviting!
2 – Brand Consistency
Brand consistency is super important. If you want to become a brand that everyone recognizes, you have to be consistent with your design across your entire web presence.
If you have a certain color scheme or logo across your social media profiles, that design has to transfer over to your website to keep people familiar with your brand. When companies don’t have a unified branding presence, it confuses customers and turns them off of the brand.
All your web pages should also have a consistent voice and style of copy. If you change your official slogan or contact information, make sure to go back and update all previous pages you’ve created.
3 – Content Readability
Have you ever been on a website or blog that is hard to read? The issue likely goes much deeper than just having poor content.
Although having good content is the most important step, a sound designer also knows what fonts viewers will easy read on most devices, how much space should be in between words and sentences, and where to place and format pictures. The overall text, color, and animation patterns should flow together to create a pleasant user experience.
Valuable information should be readable, but good design and a simple layout also help with the site’s SEO.
4 – Professionalism
Building trust with your readers and customers is one of the most important things that you can from the onset of your web presence. You must present yourself professionally as the authority in your niche. Having a quality design shows your website as a legitimate representation of your physical company.
Think about the last time you landed on a website that looked like the company hadn’t updated in the past 10 years.
Did you buy anything from them or return to the site?
The likely answer is that no, you didn’t purchase anything or return. It’s difficult to trust a company that hasn’t updated their design or put much effort into the appearance of their site. You probably wouldn’t enter a rundown office with sloppily dressed employees. This communicates that they either don’t care enough about their business to remodel it or aren’t qualified for their jobs. You shouldn’t expect anything less from a website!
Professionalism means you act like a professional in every respect! Thus, treat your business website as your virtual office space. Keep content clean and appealing in the same way you would your physical company!
5 – Responsive Design / Mobile Compatibility
For good reason, quality web designers understand the importance of a responsive web layout.
Think about how much time you spend surfing the internet, either on your cell phone or a tablet. If you’re like most people in the United States, you’re constantly surfing the web for work, listening to music, reading the news, or gaming.
Thus, it’s more important than ever to ensure website are functional for mobile devices! We are a society that demands on-the-go information through smartphones and tablets. If you don’t develop a design with content compatible with these devices, you’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity.
In addition to the design and usability aspects, having poor mobile design is also harms for your search engine ranking. The search engines want websites that have been optimized for mobile so that they can recommend sites to all different types of users, not just desktop users.
6 – Page Load Time
There’s nothing more frustrating on the internet than a page that loads slow. When a page loads slow, most people click off of the page immediately.
Obviously, that’s bad for business.
A talented web designer understands the importance of page speed and knows how to optimize the speed in setting up pages.
Whether it’s compressing images, avoiding clunky JavaScript, or knowing the correct plugins to use, an experienced designer knows how to ensure that your page speed doesn’t turn away visitors.
Power Technologies – For further enquiries on any of our expertise or services, whether it is for website design & development, mobile application development, or digital media marketing, please feel free to contact or WhatsApp (+6016)-202 1700, email [email protected] or visit powertechnologies.com.my. Thank you.
