Within 5 seconds of someone landing on your website, can your visitors figure out what your company does? Can your users easily navigate to the services or product page? Can they quickly find the best way to contact you? Is the layout of your pricing easy to understand?
A website won’t simply succeed by succeeding in limited areas such as solely design or content. Your website needs to have a design that feeds into your website’s user experience and complements your content.
Your business website needs to clearly communicate with your audience what you do and who you do it for. It’s easy to get caught up with how great you are as a business, that you forget to make sure we are addressing the main concerns of your audience.
It’s not about you, it’s about your potential clients.
Thinking of going it alone? Flying solo? Going to save some money and build your own website?
Here are some web design tips:
Don’t just dive in and build it; have a plan first.
First, map out your customers’ journey from the first time they visit your website to the moment they become a paying customer. Do this on paper if necessary, as this is a great way to visualise the way the website will be used. Trust me, it’ll save hours in the long run!
Remove things from the website (or just don’t include them just because you have seen them somewhere and thought they ‘look cool’.
Fussy, complicated animations, content that’s too long and boring, stock images that just don’t fit your brand are just a few common things on the list.
If they don’t add value, leave them out!
Include ways to share
If your website lacks social share buttons, you could be missing out on a lot of social media traffic that’s generated from people already visiting your website! let your visitors spread the word for you!
Add calls to action (also called CTAs) to encourage your visitors to get in touch or to accurately guide your clients to the content they need.
Use the right images or don’t use them at all.
Stock images can work well but be careful to pick top-quality ones that reflect your brand and send out the right message. Try and pick images that fit a style so they look as if they were taken on one photoshoot.
Navigation
There’s nothing worse than a website with a busy or confusing menu or navigation. When thinking about your website’s navigation, it’s important to ensure that your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for. Try and guide them, don’t just add pages to multiple menus in the hope they will find them.
Scrolling is acceptable
Don’t be afraid of designing a slightly longer homepage. Including several sections, will help direct new and recurring users to the correct areas of your website and can help to create a seamless and pleasurable experience.
People are used to scrolling nowadays, It’s normal!
The sections on your homepage should follow a path, a bit like this:
Value proposition – how do help potential clients?
Intro – a brief detail of how you do that
Overview of services – what do you actually do?
Features – highlight some of the main highlights
About us – a bit about your people (not too much, more can be on the ‘about us’ page)
Testimonials (I prefer to call them ‘reviews’) – some kind words to bolster trust
CTA – an easy and compelling way to get in touch
White space is good!
This area is also called ‘negative space’ and refers to the areas around elements on a page that are empty and without content or visual items.
It might seem like a waste of space (“can we just add some patterns, or fill those white bits with more ‘stuff’?” Nooo)!
I hope this has been helpful. The above forms about 20% of the work involved in designing and building a website, so let us know if you decide to hire a professional as we’d be delighted to help!