Web design best practices have come a long way in the last 20 years. When is the last time you saw an old-school HTML built website ranking highly in search engines? Or a website built using only Adobe Flash? Probably not often if we had to guess. Each passing year has brought new features, new standards, just about new everything to websites and their design.
Because of this, websites have had to continuously change and evolve to stay current with the trends and demands of website visitors and search engines alike. If you want your website to be effective in today’s online world you need to ditch dated web design trends and give search engines what they want and users what they are looking for. Where do you start? Right here:
User Experience is “the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction.” In other words, design your website with your customer in mind, period. Your website design needs to be simple and easy to use, allowing visitors to quickly and efficiently interact with it. Any mishaps or poor design choices will send your visitors right back to where they came from and off of your website. To effectively target the user experience your website should be:
The greater the number of choices you offer to someone, the harder it is for them to make a decision. This is commonly referred to as “analysis paralysis” – coined by Hick’s Law as illustrated below.
Avoid presenting too many products or services on your homepage and instead lead visitors to decisions you want them to make. In other words, turn their focus to your Call To Action (CTAs). This could include going to specific pages, filling out a form, signing up for your newsletter, making a phone call, visiting the physical store, etc. Keep your website choices to a minimum and chances are you will see a higher conversion rate.
Negative space between your design elements and content allows your website to breathe and be presented in an appealing way. Make sure you leave ample padding between text, images, and headings.
Website animations can be used to:
The over-use of animations will have the complete opposite effect – distracting or confusing your visitors. In our experience, it can make just being on your website out-right annoying. Resist the urge to overly animate your website and instead use these features strategically and sparingly.
Contrasting colors will draw the eye to specific elements in your design. Use them to highlight your logo and important words or phrases that you want your audience to immediately see.
We get it, you probably don’t want your face plastered all over your website for everyone to see. But even doing so subtly, has surprisingly powerful effects. Consider displaying a photo of your team or owners on your about page. Putting a “face to the name” can create a sense of security in people – it helps to establish a relationship before the relationship has even started.
Not only that but displaying images of people’s emotions or expressions when interacting with or using your product has been proven to convey much more than words ever could on a psychological level.
Avoid distracting your users with different shapes or colors when it comes to your Call To Actions. You don’t see Amazon’s website using a hundred different colored “Add To Cart” buttons, do you? Neither should yours. Experiment and find a good balance of color and shape that attracts the visitor’s eye and stick with it.
No matter your story, no matter your history, if your branding isn’t cohesive across all your platforms, including your website, you’re completely missing the point of branding altogether. Proper branding sets your visitors expectations – helping you to convert new customers as well as keep old ones.
When people are researching (window-shopping) they tend to go with websites that:
Keep your branding in-line with your business and your customers by ensuring that your website:
The size of your business or website does not change the importance of branding – branding is important for everyone. Help people to quickly identify and remember you across all your platforms by being consistent with your branding.
The content on your website is one of the most important factors in converting visitors and appealing search engines alike. But it can be difficult to balance the two. So what should you do?
People typically visit your service pages to learn more information about your company and the service. Create high quality content on your service pages that will allow people to effortlessly determine:
Really push to highlight the benefits of your services, not just the features. After all, you are trying to sell them on using you for your services, aren’t you? Just focusing on the features of your service puts you on the same level as every other website or business that provides the same. Following these tips will help you to convert a visitor into a customer.
People come to blog posts for answers or more in-depth information about a topic. If your website doesn’t have blogging capabilities – change it. Blogging, when done correctly, is the key to increasing your rankings and achieving loads of free organic traffic in search engines. You might be asking yourself – “How are blogs this useful? I’ve written several and nothing like what you’ve said has ever happened.”
That’s probably because your blogs are too shallow, self-promoting, or are targeting keywords you’re never going to rank for (at least not without some serious effort). Instead, focus on crafting blogs that are relevant to your business, unique, in-depth, and useful, while avoiding excessive self-promotion.
Some common, well-performing blog topics include:
Following these tips will help you to educate your customers, increase your brand awareness, and help you rank higher and reach broader audiences in searches online.
You’ve probably heard that you need a mobile-friendly website a few dozen times already. Even so, it’s arguably one of the most important practices on this list. If your website isn’t responsive to screen size and displaying correctly across phones, tablets, and desktops then you might as well not have a website at all.
Not only is this a huge disservice to the people visiting your website, but it’s also an important ranking factor. By not having a mobile-friendly website you are jeopardizing your rankings and traffic. You can’t get by not having a mobile friendly website anymore – it’s become the industry standard and you will lose your traffic if you don’t get with the times.
If you’re not first, you’re last. …okay, not necessarily. But according to the Nielsen Norman Group when “47 percent of visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40 percent of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds” you need your website to be as fast as possible. 3 seconds is all it takes for you to lose a potential customer to a competitor. How long does it take your website to load?
You don’t have to have a background in digital marketing and data analysis to be able to successfully set up and monitor traffic, goals, and conversions.
After all, if your goal is to create sales or leads via your website, wouldn’t you want to have access to this information? There are plenty of resources online that will help you do this yourself, but if you have a web designer they should have no trouble at all connecting your website to Google Analytics and setting up goals to track on a basic level.
Every year there are thousands of new websites being launched and new designs being created. Each designed to make an impact with visitors and to out-do what’s already being done by competitors. Every year you neglect your website is another year you jeopardize your business. Reinvest in your website to stay current with website design best practices and industry standards. Your website will thank you – and so will your visitors.