The design of your website is an element that is as important as the content on it or the graphic design. Web design takes care of the user experience, navigation, bounce rates, functionality and more.
Good web design communicates to your audience about who you are, what you do, and how to get in touch with you quickly.
Let's look at some easy Website Design Tips to ensure that you are doing the right things to make site visitors stick.
1. Map Out Your Strategy
Make sure that your site is designed to meet the users' needs through the buyer's journey. With the content and the design, your website should offer the visitor enough information and encourage the visitor to take the next step.
For these purposes, you have to understand the buyer's journey, accordingly design the content and the offers. The website has to answer the right questions that arise in the minds of the visitor.
2. Do away with elements that don't make the visitor stick
This could be anything that doesn't contribute to the user sticking to your website, from long, boring content, to pointless animations, to stock images that spoil the look and feel of the website. Avoid clichés like 'flexible', 'scalable', 'robust', 'next generation' and more.
Remember your audiences does not have the time to each all of your content. So, the content needs to be short, and impact, complemented by compelling pictures, graphics, and clear headers, and sub-headers.
3. Make use of Social Share and Follow Buttons
Don't forget to utilize the social share buttons, to get some organic traffic as a bonus. Make sure every blog post is easy to share, with icons of various social media platforms visible right after the headline, and after the article ends (preferably). Also, don't forget to include the follow buttons, to increase your following on different social media.
4. Use Effective CTAs
Practical CTAs guide your visitors to the next step, pages, or actions, by providing subtle directions. These buttons are the elements that encourage the visitor to take the next level. Proper nurturing of users with the top or middle of the funnel CTAs is essential before you can apply the bottom of the funnel CTA. It is crucial to nurture the visitor adequately.
It is vital to guide the audience towards resources that helps them to self-educate to alleviate their pain points. Once a trust a formed through the high-quality, and suitable self-education materials or resources, the audience will find it easier to take a look at your services. You have to give first to receive.
For example: CTAs like 'Click here for more info', 'Download the FREE PDF', 'Download the FREE eBook', 'Sign up for FREE Webinar', and more.
5. Use proper images
The images have to add more realism to the band image your company is trying to project through the website. The images have to complement the content, the subject matter, and brand identity. Not every image is going to fit with the type of message you're trying to show your audience. Stock images, though free, will not evoke trust in your website and the services you vouch to provide. If possible, it is good to use images of real people who work for you.
6. Proper Navigation
Make sure that the navigation experience through your website is not disorganized. Visitors should be able to find what they are searching for on your site quickly.
7. Optimize For Mobile
It is crucial to optimize your website for mobile. The mobile experience should be as good as the desktop experiences, as the bulk of traffic and searches comes from mobile.
8. Detect 404's or Broken Links
Check your website for broken pages, links that are not functioning smoothly. If your site has a lot of pages and links, it won't be a surprise if you find a few malfunctioning links and pages.
9. Use White Space Effectively
When it comes to design, white-space is significant as it boosts readability and helps break up the content on the page. Review your webpages to check if they lack in white space. If yes, then it is best to rearrange elements to be able to use white space effectively. Your job is to ensure that the content is grouped correctly.
10. Keep Testing
The trick to keep evaluating and test different benchmarks to ensure that the page performance is as per expectations. Some page may require updates in terms of information, while other pages could do with tweaks in design or content.
These could be as simple as changes in button colours, headers, footers, copy changes, and the likes. You may want to conduct A/B tests to find out what's working and what's not.