Let’s begin this by asking ourselves a few questions related to website design tips and techniques.
Can your visitors determine what your business is all about within 5 seconds of them landing on your website?
Are they able to easily navigate to the piece of information they require out of your website?
You might be providing an online service to your audience.
Are the visitors able to distinguish the different pricing plan you mentioned on your website?
Does your website suffer from an extremely high bounce rate?
If you answered a majority of these questions with a ‘no’, then it is time you took website designing seriously.
It’s time, that you as a website owner intervene in the website design process and take a hard look at the way your website has been optimized.
What does a Website do?
The world is turning online.
Almost everyone is on the internet and so is their attention.
For businesses, it is very important to tap into that growing attention and reach their business goals.
To do that, business owners build Business Websites which serve as an online real estate.
The business website plays the role of an attention hub for a brand battling to gain visitors back to it from various online platforms.
What Makes a Website Succeed?
Is it just about the content or just about the design?
Is it about how you optimally use both of them on your website?
Well, to be honest, these two factors are a major part of any website designing process.
But more than that, there is one factor that will have a huge impact on the success of your website.
It is none other than User-Experience!
[click_to_tweet tweet=”A website needs to have the right design, the appropriate content, smooth functionality that complements your brilliantly drafted content.” quote=”A website needs to have the right design, the appropriate content, smooth functionality that complements your brilliantly drafted content.” theme=”style5″]
It’s the responsibility of your business website to clearly communicate the W-H-W of your business:
What – is your business all about?
How – do you help your customers?
Why – do you do it?
Well, in the real world you might be doing great with your business.
Congratulations!
But to address the incessantly growing online population of the world, it is necessary for you to reciprocate the reputation when you design your business website.
You got to understand that your customers are your business!
Your business website should have the design that foremost caters to their needs and addresses the core concerns of your audience.
How Can You Make a Good Website?
In order to create a website that is exceptionally great, you need to start thinking like a visitor.
Once you do that, planning a website becomes a very easy thing to do.
To do that, you have to work backward, by answering all these important questions:
Question 1: How will you get people to your website?
Here you have to decide how you will get people on your website. This includes the marketing techniques to attract your audience. You might use Search Engine Optimization, Pay-per-Click Advertising, Social Media Marketing or maybe PR.
Question 2: Who will be coming to the site?
You should have an idea about the visitors who will be coming to your website.
Your website should be designed in a way that helps the visitor to know what he has to do next.
Do they need to sign up? Or submit a form?
Do they need to click on a link to download the book?
Figure that out fast.
Question 3: What questions will your visitors have?
Your visitors will think if they are in the right place. If they can afford your services or how good are your services or products.
Your website should answer these questions in less than 8 seconds when a visitor lands on it.
Question 4: What do you want your visitors to do?
The visitors should know what they need to do. Do they have to make a phone call? Email or just sign up for the service?
You need to be clear and concise. Don’t make the visitor think too much.
Question 5: How do your visitors like to stay in touch?
It’s important to understand that a visitor might want to stay in touch with you. Let him know how exactly can he do that.
Study that with your existing customers and find out the forms of communication you can provide.
To help you with designing the best website, we are here with 8 most important and essential website design tips that can ensure a perfected user-experience.
Here are the top 8 website design tips that you must use in 2019:
Tip #1: Always Start With A Plan
Hey! Don’t just start designing your website straightaway as you buy a unique domain.
Do you set out for a long journey without getting your car checked or refueled?
No!
Your website is your vehicle for your online journey.
So, plan your design before start designing.
You need to make sure that your website effectively meeting the needs of your visitors.
To do that, you need to precisely map out their journey on your website – right from the point where they land on your website to the moment they turn into a customer.
You need to answer these questions:
- What are the pages your potential visitors are most likely to view?
- What is the content they like to consume on a website?
- What are the offers that will lure them to convert into customers?
You need to design a business website that helps nurture your sales funnel.
Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the above questions and design a business website accordingly.
Always remember this:
“While designing a website, you need to think of the Next Step, not the Final Step.”
You got to look at your visitor and put his needs onto a pedestal.
Always begin with answering the right questions. Most importantly, you need to answer them in the right order.
And to do that, nothing works better than understanding the context you are building your business website around.
How’d you do that?
You do that by understanding the behavior, choices, and feedbacks of your current customers. To do that, you need to research into how that visitor turned into a customer.
Use this information effectively and start mapping out a killed website design.
Tip #2: Think Minimalistic
Okay, this might be hard for you to do.
But this website design tip is very important to implement.
If that beautifully hand-crafted content does zero good for you, you need to trash it!
To be honest, certain elements on your website are going to distract your visitors and not allow them to surf smoothly through your sales funnel.
They detract your visitors from the essential message or the value you are trying to convey.
Maybe you have an animation that is too complicated for your visitors to understand and use.
Who knows your content might be too long to consume. Or those stock pictures are just not enough to bring out the emotions.
Well, these are just a few factors on the list.
Today, the attention span of online users has shrunk down to just 8 seconds!
Therefore,
[click_to_tweet tweet=”You need to implement a website design that builds a first impression that easily gets the crucial points of your business across.” quote=”You need to implement a website design that builds a first impression that easily gets the crucial points of your business across.” theme=”style5″]
How would you do that?
You do that by employing short, powerful content sections and creatives that convey the right emotions.
Use clear and concise headers that are self-explanatory.
Once you are done with that, make sure your content doesn’t contain terminologies that are not understood by the audience of your niche.
And for the love of God, stop using words that almost every other website is using today.
For example next generation, flexible, robust, scalable, easy to use, cutting-edge, groundbreaking, best-of-breed, mission-critical, innovative, etc.
You get the drift, right?
Here are a few examples of minimalistic website design:
Mikiya Kobayashi
ETQ
Uber
Tip #3: Employ Social Share and Follow Buttons
Are your visitors able to share what you have on your website?
Let’s get one thing straight.
The online world is built upon networks that are made up of people who want to get the right information and share it with their community.
Okay, we get it.
You have superb content and mind-blowing offers on your website that you think are enough to make your website work for the visitors.
Well, that’s just not it.
Your website should be able to allow your visitors to share those offers and content!
How’d you do that?
You put Social Share buttons on your website.
One superb way this helps your website is that when a visitor shares the offer or content with his community, your website receives more traffic and who knows, more customers?
Social Sharing buttons are the small buttons that are mostly placed on top or bottom of the webpage and have icons of numerous social media sites.
These help the visitors to directly share the content online on social media sites.
They are non-pushy and encourage the visitors to share content to provide value to their community.
Therefore, this website design tip is very important for your website’s traffic.
Here are a few Social Media Share buttons and widgets for your website:
GetSocial
AddThis
ShareThis
SumoMe
Tip #4: Powerful Call-to-Action
A huge percentage of the visitors that land on your website doesn’t really know what to do next.
For them, it’s a completely new territory they have just landed on.
So, how would you help them?
You show them the way by using Calls-to-Action!
These are buttons or piece of content that indicate what the next step that you want the user to take.
But, implementing this website design tip for small business can be a little tricky and you might fail to accurately use them on your website.
Most of the websites we see today have just one Call-to-Action spread throughout the website.
You might spam your own website with the same content again and again and you might not know about it.
Don’t believe us?
Go through all the web pages on your website and note down all the CTAs you’ve mentioned.
Are they all the same?
Well, if they are, it’s time you update them with newer and more meaningful CTAs.
Here are examples of few websites which killed it with powerful CTAs:
Netflix
WordStream
Ikea
Trello
Create CTAs that help the visitors to find what they want and solve their problems.
This is really amazing.
When your CTAs help the visitors with their pain points, they find themselves coming back to your website more.
And one fine day, they consider your services and take the step to become a customer!
So, work on creating useful and value providing CTAs!
Related: Landing Page Best Practices To Convert Visitors Into Customers
Tip #5: Use Images that Convey Right Emotions
Let’s face it.
You can find way lot more images on the internet that you can use in your quest to convey messages through pictures.
And also there are images that you can get for free!
Therefore, images are very easy to attain resource for your website.
But still, there are many who don’t really know which images are best for their type of website.
They go on using images they think are right and end up plaguing their website with very stocky photos!
You don’t want that to happen on your website.
Why?
It’s because your website will appear fake.
It will fail to evoke trust in your business as it does not look genuine!
Frankly speaking, the customers want to know about you. They want to know about the people that work in your company.
After all, these are the people who provide service to the customers.
So, do you get the clue?
That’s right! You need to use pictures of real people working in your company.
This brings a lot of realism to your brand.
Here are a few examples of website homepages that nailed it with the right images:
Airbnb
Cobb Pediatric Therapy Services
Melyssa Griffin
Basecamp
If that’s not feasible for you, try giving time for researching images that can rightly match your brand and clearly help you explain your website.
Related: How to Make a Website more Engaging and Responsive?
Tip #6: Stop Struggling with Navigation
It’s almost 2019.
You should not struggle with navigation anymore.
We have been talking about navigation since the advent of the internet and online business.
So, it’s time that we get it right the first time around.
Believe us, there’s nothing more annoying and disturbing at the same time than a business website that has confusing or disorganized navigation.
You already know how important it is to make the visitor go where it wants to go.
When designing your website’s navigation, it’s important to make sure your visitor can get what they are looking for.
Focus on having the right navigation bar, a streamlined content and navigation hierarchy.
Not just that, ensure that the website has a responsive design so that mobile users don’t have to struggle with your website.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”The bottom line is, if your users don’t get what they want, they have every right to press that back button and move onto your competitor’s website.” quote=”The bottom line is, if your users don’t get what they want, they have every right to press that back button and move onto your competitor’s website.” theme=”style5″]
Therefore, user-experience is key.
Here the websites with the best and unique website navigation styles:
Australian Ballet
Website Navigation Type – Sticky, Responsive, mega drop-down
Kalios
Website Navigation Type – Sticky, Responsive, horizontal, fat footer
Adriatic Luxury Hotels
Website Navigation Type – Sticky, horizontal, mega drop-down, fat footer
Tip #7: Optimize for Mobile
You want to leverage the increasing population of mobile users.
If you forget mobile, mobile will forget you.
Why?
It’s because 80% of internet users today have a smartphone.
Google claims that 61% of the mobile users won’t return to a website they had trouble accessing.
40% of those visitors will not think before heading onto competitor’s site.
Now that you know this fact, it’s your responsibility to design your business website to fit the needs and wants of your visitors.
Here are a few best examples of websites that have revolutionized mobile design:
YouTube
Apple
Typeform
Airbnb
To help you with that, here are a few questions that you can ask yourself:
- Why would someone access your business website on mobile?
- What are the things that visitors might look for?
- Does your business website allow them to get what they are looking for?
Related: Why Mobile Friendly Website Is Important Than Ever: Ignore At Your Own Risk
Tip #8: White Space is Sacred Space
Whitespace is an essential design element.
When you incorporate white space on your business website, it helps to break the page and increase the text readability.
White space is sometimes referred to as ‘Negative Space.’
It majorly refers to the area around website elements that lack any kind of content.
Few will ask whether leaving space on the website is an inefficient usage of the online real estate.
Well, white space might seem superfluous to many, it is very effective to boost readability and content prioritization.
This definitely helps to strategize the location of text and design elements.
So, this is what you have to do.
Go through your web pages again. Find the web pages that lack white space and start getting rid of unnecessary content. Delete content that does not solve the purpose.
Then group the relatable content so that visitors can distinguish the content on the page.
Here are a few example websites that best use white spaces:
Apple
Dropbox
Final Thoughts
Perfect website design focuses on what the visitor wants and will press on providing that with zero hassle.
It’s highly important in this impatient world of the internet to have a website that answers every question within seconds.
While there are millions of websites on the internet, there are only thousands who deliver with the discussed website design tips and techniques.
So, you have a great opportunity to make a mark and create a website design that helps your business succeed.
We hope we brought great value to your through this article.
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