Your website is the first interaction potential customers have with your brand. It can affect how people feel about your brand and how they interact with it. More importantly, it can be a crucial determinant of conversion rate, return visits, and referral rate.
It is no surprise then that improving website design is something most businesses look into frequently. However, not all companies may need to improve their website design.
So, before you get into the twelve tips on how to improve website design effectively, I implore you to ask yourselves these questions:
If you answered ‘no’ to more than one of these questions, your website is in desperate need for an improved design, and here are some tips you can use:
Table of Contents
Twelve Tips to an Improved Web Design
1) Use White Space
Let’s start from the simplest tip; using white space in your web design. This is one of those fundamental principles they teach graphic designers, but you would be surprised by the number of designers who don’t implement them when building a client’s site.
White space is the space on your website where there isn’t any design, text, image, etc. It is the space around the content on your website. This space is significant because it makes your site look more appealing and put together, allowing users to focus on more important things.
Some studies have shown that white space around website content increases user’s attention by 20%.
2) Improve Your Call-To-Action
Another tip from our website design tips list is to improve your call-to-action. Every website should have a purpose, a goal you are trying to achieve with certain aspects/pages on your website, and you should enhance that goal with CTA.
Improving your web design with call-to-actions (CTAs) is critical for improving website design. CTA could be in the form of action buttons, contact forms, etc. Whatever method you decide to call your users to action, make sure your CTA is visually appealing to your target audience, and extremely clear on the action you want them to perform.
3) Check for 404 Errors or Broken Links
There is nothing more annoying for users than a broken link on a web page. If I were to go on a website and get a 404 error, I would think the owners of the site weren’t taking their website seriously. 404 errors aren’t just annoying; they also make your website run slow and negatively affect your ranking on search engines.
But how do you check for broken links? Luckily for you, there are numerous free tools out there that you can use to check for 404 errors and broken links. Do your research on the tools out there, pick the ones that work with your needs, run them to identify whatever problem area, and fix the issues immediately.
4) Increase Website Loading Speed
A fast loading website can positively affect the amount of time visitors spend on your site. There have even been studies carried out to this effect. Optimizing your website load time means that you remove things on your website that make it load slower, therefore increasing load speed and simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction. Below is a checklist to follow when optimizing load time:
5) Make Your Navigation Clear
Imagine visiting a website and spending a long time looking for pages; it would annoy and frustrate you, wouldn’t it? If customers complain that your contact details are not immediately visible on your website, or that they can’t access your blog or shop page, then you know that your navigation needs work.
Whatever industry you find yourself in, make sure that visitors on your website can easily access all the products/services your company has to offer. Organize your site’s navigation bar, so only the necessary things are there. Visitors should immediately see the different sections of your website from your navigation bar, so they aren’t wasting time roaming through your site.
6) Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
Do you know how many internet users own a smartphone? More than 80%! So why isn’t your website already optimized for mobile devices?
Even Google changed its search algorithm to ensure that mobile-optimized websites with a fast loading speed get a higher ranking in search engines than those websites not optimized for mobile.
Some tools help users check the load time of their website on mobile. Make sure you use them to test your website’s mobile responsiveness and fix the issues that need fixing in a bid to get the most optimized mobile site.
7) Include ‘Share’ Button on Your Site
We decided to add this tip to our website design tips because it not only enhances the experience users have on your website, a share button also acts as a form of promotion for your website.
Adding a share button on your site encourages people to share your website on social media. So, you have visitors who like your website, sharing it with their social circle, thus increasing your website visibility.
Some of the best website designing help guides have website builders they recommend who have sharing buttons as a tool you can construct on your website.
8) Improve your SEO
Search engine optimization is an essential tip on our list of website design tips. With a search engine optimized website, you know that your intended target audience will always find you.
However, search engine optimization is not the simplest thing to do, so some businesses run away from it. Still, with these few essential tips, you can start your SEO for your website;
9) Have a Responsive Site
Having a responsive site is probably one of those things most website admins ignore, and they find out too late how important it is. Let me give you an example; imagine I am a customer, and I frequent your site often, share your content with my circle, and I’m continually buying products from your website, but there’s nowhere for me to leave my feedback or comments. How do you think that would make me feel?
No doubt, customers who find that websites don’t have feedback/comment sections on their website must feel that there is no way to communicate with them.
A feedback/comment section on your website isn’t only for the benefit of the customer though, with a comment section, companies can engage with their existing customers, promoting loyalty.
10) Create a Customer Persona and Create Content For Them
With this, I simply mean meeting your intended audience at eye level. Explain to them how you can solve their problems with your product/service. Or how your product could bring relevance to their lives.
It’s all about restructuring your grammar, so it’s for them, and not to toot your own horn. For example, instead of having a page called ‘case studies, ‘ switch it up to ‘success stories.’
11) Make your Home Page Scrollable
You may have heard about the above the fold website design. Well, in 2020, do away with it. It is an old way of designing your website, and keeping with the trend in your website design is vital.
Design slightly longer homepages, with different sections that you want to highlight to your customers. The parts could cover your product features, company introduction, or even testimonials. It all depends on what you think your users want to see instantly, and the content you require most visible to them.
12) Never Stop Testing
Just as growth never stops, so does testing. If you want to improve your web design, you need to test your website continually. You can do this by subscribing to any web analytics tool out there.
Businesses who are able to optimise their website in the best fashion possible see a lot of performance. We are talking about better reach, lower bounce rates, exposure and sales. While every business might not have the resources to set up their own design and development team, they can always take help from expert Web Design Companies.
Getting all the 12 tips in order and periodically reviewing them might be too much for you as a boss, or for your internal team. However, it is something, which great web design companies do on a daily basis.
Final Thoughts
Simplicity is the ultimate key to these website design tips I shared. Only put relevant content on your website, and you will find your site already ticking all the boxes from the tips above. However, if you need further website designing help, or you need content created on your website, writing review service reviews such as Best Writers Online Is an excellent place to get help
- 12 Tips for Improving Your Web Design - May 24, 2020