Your Website Design Should Have These Elements

When it comes to modern website design, many people think it’s all about how many bells and whistles a website has. But the more simple and clean a website design is, the better the user experience is. Website design affects the user experience in the following ways:

• It guides eyes down a page. The goal is to keep visitors on your site—and to keep them scrolling. One effective way of doing this is to break up content into manageable chunks. Banner images, fonts, and white space can be used to make it easier for visitors to get the information they need. 

• It captures a visitor’s attention. It only takes a fraction of a second for a visitor to decide whether or not they will stay on your website. When things are cluttered, it’s not a pleasant experience for visitors—and chances are they will click onto something else.

• It increases functionality. Because so many people access the internet from their mobile devices, your site needs to be functional across any platform. 

• It promotes professionalism. Think about it: You’ve likely clicked on a website for a business that clearly hasn’t been updated for a decade or more. What does that say about the company? What does it do to promote professionalism? What does it do to build trust? Not much.

A great website design will provide people with the perception that you are professional and reliable. It lets visitors feel like you know what you are doing. It gives them the confidence to buy your product or service.

Incorporate These Elements into Your Website Design

Make sure your website is geared toward turning visitors into customers by incorporating these elements into your website design.

A clean design. This element of modern website design is just what it sounds like: You should design your site so it is pleasing to your visitors. Sometimes companies, desperate for better rankings among search engines, tend to do things that Google likes but that do not benefit the user. Don’t make this mistake. Keep your website user-friendly to please potential customers rather than Google. Google is smart enough to know when visitors keep going to your website because they are getting good value, they will reward you for it.

Optimized for SEO. Although you should focus on the user rather than search engines, this doesn’t minimize the importance of SEO. Design tricks include things like meta tags, heading tags, title tags, and other HTML coding that will help your site climb through the Google ranks.

A good color palette. A website is visual, so the use of color is important. Make sure you use a color palette that is cohesive with everything your business puts out. Don’t make the mistake of incorporating too many colors; most modern websites use two or three colors in their major design elements. If you take a look at other websites, such as Target.com or Amazon.com, you can see that they do not use a lot of different colors. Using too many different colors is just distracting, and it doesn’t add anything positive to a website.

Plenty of white space. Just as important as the colors you use, you need to have plenty of white space on the site. And to be clear—white space does not necessarily have to be white. It just means you don’t need to pack every page on your site with “stuff.” A clean design with plenty of white space serves as a buffer between all the elements on your page and a visitor’s eyes. Give visitors room to breathe when they are on your site. 

Calls to action. Since the main reason for your business website is to convert visitors into customers, you need to tell people what you’d like them to do. These calls to action (CTAs) should be incorporated into your site strategically. They should gather information from visitors in the form of emails. You can offer free products—downloadable ebooks, white papers, free product forms, and so on—to entice people into leaving their information. Once you’ve captured that, you can continue the conversation, as it were, and spend more time converting leads into customers. 

High-Quality videos. Video marketing continues to grow in popularity in both B2B and B2C businesses. Videos are a great way to show off what your business has to offer its customers. According to Inc. magazine, some 92 percent of B2B customers watch videos online. Your business cannot afford to miss out on this essential part of the decision-making process. Short videos enable potential customers to quickly understand more about your product or service; keep them short and sweet. Visitors are likely to click away from videos that are too long.

Speed optimization. This is one element of your web design that cannot be overlooked. People today are in a hurry—and they expect technology to follow suit. If your website doesn’t load as soon as they click on it, chances are they’ll give up and move on within seconds—never to return. Having a slow site will reflect poorly on your business. 

Some of the ways to ensure your website is optimized for speed include the following:

• Optimize photos—even the small ones

• Use compression to ensure files are smaller and open more quickly

• Choose the right hosting options

• Talk to a professional about developer tools and other ways to improve the speed of your site.

And don't forget about the speed of your mobile site. That’s probably the way most people will visit your site, and they will just click off your site if it’s too slow.

Does your business website fall short when it comes to these modern elements? Reach out and contact Denver Website Designs today and we can do an audit of your current website design. We help companies enjoy the success that comes with growing their business. Talk to one of our dedicated professionals today about how an improved website can help transform your business and take it to the next level.