Are you a writer? A webmaster? An entrepreneur who seeks to use the power of web to promote your business? How many visitors do you attract to your website? How many are staying? Are your visitors converting on your website? If not, you may need to take a good look at how your website is designed. Chances are, your website design isn’t doing a good job of pulling in the visitors.
When you’re designing a website to showcase your business, you need to ensure that it reflects the high-quality of your business. Creating qualitative content is a pre-requisite to your website success, but no one would be able to digest your content if your web design is unwelcoming. That’s why it’s important to create a website that engages and interests your audience. Having a great website goes a long way in showcasing your brand, business, products, and blog. In fact, a poor web design can push users away and cause them to visit your competitors instead.
So, let us look at some simple and effective methods to spice up the quality of your web design!
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Design for readability
When a search is looking for a business or product through search engines, they're often looking for more information on a website. Their usually looking to see the different options in the market and being knowledgeable of what they're paying for. Nowadays, shoppers are much smarter, because they research every product or service online before making a full purchase. That's why you want to design a website that is readable to keep these searchers on your site and buy from you.
If your website is stuffed with content and lack of space, it may cause your website to look overcrowded with content. The design should support content a way that doesn’t aggravate the eyes of the viewer. One way to improve your web design is through spacing and line length. You want to ensure that your texts aren’t reading off the page or too long to follow. Make sure that you have the right margins or text frames to keep your content in a fixed space.
The spacing of your content is an important factor to consider as well. They’re like the breathing room for your visitors when moving from one idea to another. Make sure you leave an adequate amount of space to make your content look organized.
Another way to improve readability is through the use of white space. White space not only helps your text to stand out, but provides a spacious and minimalistic affect to your website. Apple does a great job in using minimum text and maximum space. It makes their products stand out in the middle of the webpage. The simplicity of their web design makes it easy for the eyes and have you focus on what's important, their product.
Choose the Right Colours
Colours are essential to the creation of a powerful web design. Colour affects conversion rates, big time! Research from Quick Sprout indicates that 90% of product assessments are made on the basis of colour. The choice of colour will determine the tone, theme, and mood of your web design project. Different colours impact viewers in different ways. Hence, your web design strategy needs to include selection of the appropriate colours. The choice of colour for your web design can either attract your visitors to stay or cause them to lose focus of your content. Therefore, you need to visualise in your mind the kind of mood you want to create in the viewer through your webpage and you need to determine the theme of your web project.
You should play around with different colours on your website to see what prompts a conversion. For example, your Call-to-Action button on your website isn’t only affected by the text, but the colour as well. A bright red colour is often associated with stop or caution, so when you’re trying to encourage your users to convert, you should definitely avoid this colour. However, colours like green or blue is more calming and gives the idea of go or continue should be used instead.
The colour of your website background can also affect readability and conversion. Toy’s us – a website which promotes toys for children- makes use of white background against which the images of toys to help their products stand out. They use light pastel colours that are easy on the eyes and give a sense of innocence, like children. Making use of the colour of their products can prompt visitors to convert and consider purchasing the product. Imagine if the background was of a darker shade? Would it be that impactful and bring about conversion rates? These small details can make a big change in making your consumers convert.
Influence with Typography
The font on your website is often underestimated. Many business owners don’t realize that the typography used to convey your message can affect the way it’s digested by the users. Outlandish fonts will not stand scrutiny. Timid looking fonts will not garner attention. That’s why you need to find a suitable that shows authority, while ensuring readability.
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Luckily, there are plenty of options out there you can choose from to find the perfect type for your website. In fact, companies are coming out with a variety of type libraries, which can be used for websites. Google have also created a comprehensive web font type library, which provides a considerable number of options for different web designers. However, it’s about choosing the right one that works best for your business.
A study reported that use of particular fonts determine whether audience will consider certain messages believable and creditable. For example, information presented in Comic Sans Font was considered to be less believable than information presented in other fonts. Hence, it is important to empirically determine and use the most reliable font for your web design efforts and use unpopular fonts in the rarest of the rare cases. Consider the emotion you want your words to have on the readers.
Build Trust with Logos
A great way to improve the quality of your web design is to design a brand logo. This brand logo symbolises your company’s presence. The brand logo can be located on a part of a website, where it can draw the attention of your audience in an effective way without distracting from the main content displayed.
Another way is to use “trust” logos or “security” logos which represent authentication by some trusted agencies. Use of “trust logos” in a proper way can boost up conversion rates because it gives your users a sense of security and authenticity. Experts say that proper placement of the “trust logos” either at the top or near the check-out page or subscription box can increase conversion rates. On seeing these logos, people may be persuaded to take the needed action.
For example, if you’re making purchases on an eCommerce site, you want to ensure that you banking information aren’t given away and your information is secure on their system. By including logos that ensure security levels are high, it gives users a sense of ease when filling out their information.
In addition, including logos of certifications and accreditations can prove to users that you are certified for the services and products you offer. You can even include logos that are associated with a well-known association or partnership. Make sure they are relevant and can provide positive impact for your business. These logos help to show that you’re an expert or trusted business; this may help prompt users to convert on your site.
Intelligent Navigation
One reason why people drop out from engaging with a website is its poor navigation. Often, the navigation layouts can be very confusing and messy. The less important links may be put at the most visible places.
Navigation should be planned on the website layout so that the necessary links are highlighted in the most visible places and the least important places are pushed to the bottom of the page. You want to encourage users to move around on your website and read more on your website by easily navigating around. One way to prevent crowded links on your site is by creating drop down menus. These drop drown menus allow you to categorize your links and make it easier for users to find the page they are looking for.
There are many ways to keep the navigation on your website simple and easy to use. For example, many websites opt to include a search option to allow for easy searching through the website. It helps them curate all the content related to the term they're looking for, especially if they're looking for a specific product name.
One thing to keep in mind when you're designing your website is to keep it consistent. Your menu bar should appear in the same places, so your users are familiar with using your site. In the end, you want your users to find what they want from your site and convert!
Web Design is an extremely critical element, if not, one of the central element to attaining and maximizing conversion rates on your websites. While there are many essentials which contribute to a successful web design, attention to readability, use of appropriate colours and typography, careful placement of logos, and intelligently laid out navigation are some assured ways of reaching the goal of maximum conversions.
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that’s good, thanks for sharing,.. I think this is great blog
on
Very useful article!! Like the way you have mentioned about such good suggestions. It would be very useful for all other readers too !! Keep sharing such informative posts like this.
on
Great article and very useful suggestions. With tools like Wix.com and Light CMS, more small businesses are using these companies to save on the cost of an expert website builder. Small businesses with extremely tight budgets have the ability to create their own websites. However, articles like this one identify there is so much more to designing a website. I purchased the “The Web Designer’s Idea Book” when I first started helping clients with their websites. The book contains screen shots of websites arranged by color, style and a host of other areas of importance. Before I purchased the book I had no idea designing for “look” and “usability” could be such a daunting task. This one article holds a wealth of information for anyone attempting to build their own website.
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Thanks Mike. “The Web Designer’s Idea Book” is a must have book for all designers for reference and design inspiration.
on
One thing I wish more sites would include is a good site map, yes the search bar can simplify site navigation but there are times when your query isn’t phrased quite well enough to yield the results you are looking for. For me at least, a site map versus search is the difference between a test with multiple choice and a test with fill-in-the blank answers.
Also, while verisign logos may look good they are pretty much meaningless without a certificate as most anyone with some photo editing know-how can make their own. Aside from that, I found this article quite informative, especially for those just getting into internet marketing and website design.