A well-designed website is a valuable asset for your business that can significantly boost your revenue. 38% of people say they don’t explore a website if it’s not well-designed. If you haven’t updated your website in a while, it’s time to bring it up to industry standards. Moreover, a poor web design could unintentionally hurt your business.
If you plan to revamp your website to make it more appealing to your target market, our web design practices will help you update your site.
Best Web Design Practices for 2021
If you design websites, you know how important it is to make an enjoyable and easy to understand web layout. After all, if your web design is complicated your customers will have a hard time understanding your business. Here are a few straightforward practices for web designing.
- Target Audience
Whether you are designing a blogging website or an automobile services site, you need to understand your target audience. Knowing your target audience’s likes and dislikes allows you to design a website tailored to their needs. Moreover, your audience will easily understand your services from the home page, which will reduce friction in the buying process.
- Conveying Your Value Proposition
Value proposing is a unique and innovative feature of your business that makes your product/service attractive to your customers. However, failing to communicate your value proposition properly to the customer could drastically impact your earnings. There are several ways to communicate your value proposition and a web copy is one of them. For instance, if you are a web designing agency, make sure your website is unique and appealing, like whitepeakdigital.com.
- Layout
Your website layout is the most important aspect of web designing. Don’t create a cluttered layout, because they are visually confusing, and users don’t know where to put their attention. Instead, create a focal point. For instance, an e-commerce website’s focal point is the magic buy button or the catalogue. However, a SaaS website will focus on generating leads or drive visitors towards a trial or demo of the service.
- Colour Scheme
Psychology of colours is an aspect of neuromarketing used in website designing. Colours play an important role in generating leads, directing attention and most of all, increasing your visitors time on your website. Imagine a website with bright yellow colour and white text. Would you spend more than 10 seconds? Hurting your eyes?
- Text Placement
Back when SEO wasn’t as strictly monitored by Google as today, web content writing used to be about keyword stuffing or writing long-form content. Now that Google has updated its algorithm, long-form content and keyword stuffing don’t help much with website designing. Instead, proper text placement is the key to attracting customers and generating sales. Making an easily readable and trustworthy website is a crucial factor of an exceptional website design. So make sure you don’t overpopulate your web with content.
- Search and Navigation
Don’t make it hard for users to find what they need because web users have several options and they won’t spend more than 5 seconds looking for what they want. An excellent website has easy navigation and a search bar to locate things that are not the primary focus of your website. Moreover, your users shouldn’t have trouble locating the ‘About Us’ page or the ‘Contact Us’ form so go easy on web copy creativity and spell these terms as they are. Most businesses lose potential sales because they use creative terms for “About Us” and “Contact Us” which their target audience can’t understand. So refrain from being overly creative and stick to the basics.
- Fonts and Images
Although there is an overwhelming number of fonts to choose from, you can break down your choices into two types:
- Serif fonts
- San serif fonts
Serif fonts are pointy and have hard curves making them strong, bold, and prominent. However, these fonts are mostly used for online publication and content writing websites. On the other hand, san serif fonts are rounded with soft curves.
San serif fonts are used mainly for e-commerce websites, blogs and other websites not related to content writing or publication. Distinguishing between fonts is important because a wrong choice can throw off your web users’ attention and cause confusion.
Images are also important to convey what your website stands for because most web users will quickly skim through your site without reading what’s written. Therefore, web designers use images to communicate value proposing and business functions. However, adding too many pictures can make your website heavy. Therefore, sticking to a maximum of 4 to 5 pictures per page is a good idea.
- Mobile Compatibility
Last but the most important aspect of web designing is making it mobile compatible. A majority of search engine traffic comes from mobile users, and if your website is not mobile compatible, you will lose potential customers. However, it’s not enough for your mobile website to look good. You need to add relevant functionality as well so your mobile users can conveniently navigate through your website. Adding features, like store locator, product search, and service details, will give your mobile users the tools they need to use your website.
Ending Note
Designing a website that is convenient for your target audience and search engines is not easy. There are a lot of things that go into making a well-designed and structured website. However, the website design practices mentioned above are a good start. You scale functionality and add new features to your website once you improve your google ranking and web traffic. In the meantime, sticking to the basics of website designing is the way to go forward.
