User experience and professional web design are core elements crucial to winning customers online and boosting profits. With the demands of a data-driven market economy, developing an impressive website design is instrumental in creating a more accessible user experience. The union of these two elements is essential in achieving better conversion rates and ultimately paves the way to boost your profits. Web design is way more than just looking aesthetically pleasing to your website visitors. In fact, each element that makes up your web page has a significant impact on your site visitors’ activity when they land on your page. As a webmaster, your goal is to capture the hearts of your site visitors, provide answers to their query, keep them engaged, encourage them to subscribe, and prompt them to respond to your call-to-action.
In fact, design principles became so appealing that people started to use them as guiding points for transforming organizations. This led to the emergence of business design – a discipline about applying design thinking to the organizational structure. Though this approach is all the rage now, not all companies embrace it. However, every business can make design work for their brand. Being a marketer, I saw many businesses rise and fall because of design. All those succeeding seemed to follow a few simple guidelines. I’ll list some of these trends here for you to try them out and maybe onboard them in your company.
Web Design To Boost Business Growth
Starting a web design business is an ideal opportunity. The industry is growing at a rapid rate and now’s the time to invest in creating a successful brand. However, it is a competitive industry so it’s important to carefully lay the foundation for your business so you can avoid those “Wait, what???” scenarios that too many first-time business owners face.
- Make your site mobile responsive
- Mobile responsiveness is critical for a website to be effective. American adults spend more than five hours on their mobile phones every day, while more than one-third do all of their shopping online via mobile device. Needless to say, your business’s mobile website must offer a positive user experience.
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Make it easy to find
- You need a domain name that either matches your company name or describes your business in some way. You can even have multiple domains that point to the website. This means incorporating technical SEO best practices, keyword research, content marketing and paid advertisement campaigns to drive traffic to your website.
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Design With The Customer In Mind
- Generally, one of the purposes of your small business website is to acquire customers. So, you have to design with them in mind.
This manifests itself in a few ways, but two common mistakes I see are:
- Not speaking to customer problems
- Not having clear calls to action
- Generally, one of the purposes of your small business website is to acquire customers. So, you have to design with them in mind.
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Keep your design simple
- Limit the use of fonts, colors, and GIFs, which can distract and pull the eyes away from the focus of the webpage. Short paragraphs and bullet points also make the information more scannable and likely to be read. Ian Lurie, CEO of internet marketing company Portent Inc., suggests keeping paragraphs shorter than six lines.
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Represent Your Personality
- Just as brick-and-mortar businesses invest heavily in their storefronts to represent their brand images, e-commerce retailers need to create high-quality online experiences in keeping with the brand perception, as Tom Lounibos, co-founder of SOASTA, told Business News Daily.
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Incorporate SEO best practices
- Many, if not, all businesses today invest in SEO to improve their website rankings. With over 12 billion searches on Google alone, it really pays off to have an effective SEO strategy in place to outshine all other websites who offer the same product or service as you.
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- your top-level navigation menu to five clearly labeled tabs, with related pages organized under them. You should also offer a clear way to get back to the homepage no matter where your readers land. Very often, a Google search may take your reader to a page on your website other than the homepage.
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- Another way to enhance your web design is to make it easy to share your content Free plugins like sumome or addthis make it easy for people to share content that you’ve created, especially on your blog. This increases the probability that more people see and/or link to your content, which should factor into your design.
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Use Clear Calls To Action
- Each page on your website should entice the reader to do something. In other words, you need to give them a call to action. These landing pages should encourage users to take a certain action, such as to call your company, sign up for a service, buy a product, download a whitepaper, or do something else that benefits your business goals. Give them a noticeable invitation to take the action: a button, a link, or clear verbiage. Keep it above the fold if possible so that readers do not have to scroll before finding the call to action.
Conclusion
Design can boost your business growth in multiple ways. Being a key agent to transform brands, it can improve sales and production efficiency. Three global trends of design as a coherent discipline manifest in practical guidelines for building a website. By making our online presence customer-based, we create a great customer journey and lead users along the conversion path.
However, they are unlikely to take any actions on your website if your brand doesn’t have credibility and trust. This can be fixed by making your online presence authentic and principle-based. Finally, strong visuals and video enriching your design can spark innovation, straighten your brand and differentiate your product (or service).