Whether you are a new business creating your first website or an established business doing a re-design, the appearance and design of your website says a lot about you as a company. It’s the first forward-facing image that consumers see when interacting with your brand, and as such, needs to be well-designed and in alignment with your core business principles. The entire process can seem very overwhelming and daunting as this is such an important part of your business’s marketing materials, says christoph trappe a technology advisor. Even if you’re hiring a design agency, you still want to make sure that you are very hands-on in this process – from choosing the colors to being able to compare ecommerce platform features for online stores . Here are some really important tips to consider when deciding on a design:
Less Is More
Prioritize the things that are the most important to you that you absolutely need to have on the site and the main message that absolutely must get conveyed. Quality over quantity. You don’t want to overwhelm your customers with too much random information. Keep the design clean, concise, and to the point.
This is also true when it comes to the features and functionality of the site as well. Especially if you are hiring a web development company, the more features, the pricier the website is going to cost. Narrow it down to just a few that you absolutely need. This will make the life of the website designer easier and will also be easier on your checkbook, says ashley pollitt from ENBC Technology. Don’t sacrifice the quality of the site for the possibility of all the cool things that you could do. When everything is equally cool and important, than nothing ends up being important. Focus on the key functional items that you need to have without going overboard.
Strong Calls To Action
What good is a website if the user doesn’t know how to get in touch with you or how to buy your product or take the next step? Some of the most beautifully designed website can often forget that the entire point of the site is to drive the customer to make a conversion – be it a phone call, filling out a form, downloading a whitepaper, or whatever the next step would be. Make sure that the call to action on the site are very clean and obvious. Use bright but not obnoxious colors so that it stands out from other areas of the site. Put CTAs is user friendly areas throughout the site so that they have multiple opportunities to reach out and take that next step without needing to search for how to get in touch.
The Balance of Pictures and Words
In general, people don’t really read much these days and online this is no different. If you have a super long page on your website full of a bunch of nothing but text, chances are no one is going to read it. Make sure to breakup content into digestible snippets that is easy to read. This could mean using headers or bullet points, highlighting or bolding important information and so on. Also use pictures when possible. In this visual world, a picture is worth a thousand words. One image could convey an entire paragraph of information. At the same time though, you want to make sure that you still have actual text on the page of the website since the text is what search engines are able to read (not the pictures), which makes content a very important part of search engine optimization.
Mobile and Responsiveness
Extremely important as smartphones are becoming the number one way that users visit websites. Making sure that your website is mobile friendly or responsive is an absolutely must! Gone are the days of poor looking website that don’t resize for a phone. Now if you don’t have an up to date website that looks good on all types of mobile devices, users will instantly move away, causing you to lose money from a potential new customer.