Think of your website as your virtual storefront. People stop by, check what you offer, and decide whether to buy or not. Thus, you need a website representing your brand and your business.
You need a website that easily conveys your brand and showcases your products or services. Whether you have an e-commerce site, company website, or blog site, your website is your ticket to better engagement, sales, and revenue.
Your website design can make or break your audience engagement, says Pranjal Bora from Digital Authority Partners. From stocky images to redirects, from messy home page designs to misspellings, correcting and enhancing your website design helps improve customer experience.
Five Strategies to Enhance Website Design
There’s always room for improvement! This year, take time to evaluate your website design and performance. To help you fix design issues, we have curated a list of the top tips.
Find and Remove Stocky Images
Remove all distracting, malfunctioning, and stocky images and content. If you need to, start from scratch. Not only are stocky images affecting customer engagement, but these can also slow your site down. A slow and unresponsive site can increase bounce rate and drag your engagement down the drain.
Before starting your site image overhaul, create brand guidelines to help you and your website design team focus on your goals. Consider the following tactics:
- Use engaging images. Your audience has only an eight-second attention span.
- Use consistent font styles. Open Sans, Montserrat, Roboto, and Helvetica are the most widely accepted fonts. These fonts are very readable and minimalistic.
- Choose your website colors well. Avoid sharp and distracting colors.
- Your logos must be well-designed, professional-looking, and original. Logos must be consistent in all your online platforms.
- Refrain from using animations and GIFs. Not only will these elements take a lot of time to load, but it’s also distracting for anyone who’s reading your content.
- White space or overlay makes regular content stand out, so don’t be afraid to use them.
- Pick the best stock images. Choose only realistic images. Use a reverse image search tool to determine how many sites are using the same image.
Include Social Media in Web Design
Your social media platforms are a part of your online marketing campaigns. Having these readily available from your website can greatly improve engagement and business reputation.
Consider adding social media access points, such as social buttons or logos, to your home page and content pages. With these buttons, your audience can readily share your content on their social media pages, improving your link-building campaigns.
Having these social media touchpoints lets you easily identify which of your content is getting more attention and which ones are not.
Your customers and clients also use social media to connect with you. Aside from checking out your content and sharing them, your customers may leave reviews and testimonials about your company. These reviews can be about your service or the products you offer. You can use these testimonials to improve your site further and draw more attention to your brand.
- Share video or text testimonials made by your clients.
- Use an easy-to-read layout for reviews.
- Prefer reviews coming from users with complete names or business names.
- Use only genuine reviews and testimonials.
The Most-Fitting Website Design for Your Audience
The right web design should fit your company and your audience. If you have a local hair salon business that caters to women, it would be fitting to have a web design related to your customers. Site elements like photos of the latest hairstyles, details about the latest hair treatments, and info about hair care are just a few to consider.
For an eCommerce site, site content must focus on the products you sell, giving your customers the chance to know your products well before they purchase. Aside from the product image, add the product features and specs as text content. The product’s dimensions (size and weight) and price must be readily available.
If you have a special offer or discount for the product, include these on the page. Your customers will appreciate the bonus info!
Avoid “request pricing” dilemmas. This means your customers will need to sign up to know the price of your service or products. They are more likely to leave your site and go for a business with straightforward pricing.
Use tables and infographics to break down information into digestible bits. You may use a table to compare product specs, pricing, and other features. Meanwhile, infographics make complicated instructions easier.
You can rely on website design tools when working on a DIY website. Tools like Canva can help you make site designs and designs for blogs, infographics, social media content, and more. Canva is free, but a paid version has more designs, templates, and features.
If you have long and complex content or a website with tons of information, it would be best to add a navigation tool to help your visitors find their way. With a navigation tool, you’re giving your audience a chance to read your entire content or pick the ones they find necessary.
You can use a simple navigation tool or make subsections to improve site browsing further. Place this navigation tool at the start of your content, just like the table of contents of a book.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users
Smartphones are handy and practical for daily mobile computing use. These gadgets are a part of our daily lives, with more people relying on smartphones for information and shopping. As a business owner with an online store, you must optimize your desktop website for mobile use.
- Your desktop and mobile website must be similar to help users become familiar with using your site.
- Your mobile website must perform its core functions well, whether it’s providing information, ordering products, or scheduling a service.
- Use a website audit service to find any issues with your mobile site.
- Contact details and business information must be the same on your desktop and mobile platforms.
Final Words
Consider these key techniques to optimize your website design. Never overlook the importance of a good design. Expect improved audience engagement, better site metrics, and higher revenues with a well-designed and optimized website or blog site.
