Do you think you can get away with a poor website design in today’s world? Think again. An estimated 75% of people judge the credibility of a business based on web design.
If your current web design isn’t providing the results you’re looking for, then doing a website redesign will help your site get up to speed. Follow the web design tips below to learn how to design a website for results.
1. Use Whitespace Wisely
The days of creating colorful websites with cluttered content are over. People expect to find what they’re looking for straight away when they arrive on a site. If you have a cluttered design, that task becomes much too complicated. This is even much more challenging for users with disabilities (blind, visually impaired, dyslexic, etc.) which is why you might also want to consider using page overlays to make your site more accessible.
Using white space is a way of utilizing a minimal design that highlights your site’s essential sections. Your website elements need enough room to breathe. This means that your words, images, and website sections should have plenty of space around them.
This makes your content easier to find and read. Since a whitespace design is minimal, your readers will be able to consume your work without being distracted by irrelevant content.
2. Keep Consistent Themes
One of your biggest goals with your website design is to establish your site as a brand. For this to happen, you need a consistent theme throughout your site and social media channels.
Make sure you use similar colors, layouts, and images across all your pages. Doing this makes it easier for your visitors to navigate your site. They’ll know which parts of your website pages to skip to if they have specific information they want to find.
A consistent website design also makes it easier to update your site. It allows you to reuse website elements across your whole site instead of starting from scratch with each page.
3. Structure Your Content
Visuals aren’t the only thing you have to worry about in web design. The way your content looks is just as important as your website colors and images. One of the best business web design tips is to put some work into formatting your content to look good.
One of the keys to doing this is to design your content to be scannable. Most people jump through web pages quickly to see if your page has the answer they’re looking for. You can answer this question by separating your content into sections.
Your sections should detail the different parts of your articles and the answers they contain. Think of every question someone might have when they visit a particular page and answer those questions with your headings.
Many of your users will find what they need as soon as they arrive on your site. For others, they’ll need to dig a little deeper and check out the rest of your site.
It’s a problem if these people can’t find their way around your site. If your navigation isn’t straightforward, you’ll end up with frustrated users that leave to head to one of your competitors.
For your menus, keep your options low and focus on your main categories. These should be high-level categories that are gateway pages to your other content.
You can also use internal links to lead your visitors to more relevant content. Doing this reduces the need for people to spend their time clicking through menus and random pages.
5. Create a Mobile-Friendly Design
Did you design your website on your desktop? If so, you might have only seen your site on large screens. Unfortunately, this won’t do well for people who visit your site from mobile devices.
Much of today’s internet traffic comes from internet-enabled devices. Smartphone browsers are good, but they won’t resize your site to fit mobile screens. It’s up to you to create those designs.
You can accomplish this by doing a responsive design. A responsive design contains code that detects the screen size of your visitors’ devices. Once it has this information, the design is changed to fit those screens.
If you want to save time and money during this process, start the design process for mobile-first. It’s easier to add website elements to a design than remove them.
6. Optimize Your Speed
Just like you need to change your design to meet mobile users’ needs, you also have to enhance your site’s performance, so it loads quickly for them.
You can’t count on a mobile internet connection to stay fast all the time. There are a lot of poor coverage areas out there. A large website might not work well in these areas.
One of the main culprits of a slow-loading website is images. High-quality images also take up a lot of bandwidth and will create a poor experience for mobile users.
You can cut down your image sizes by running them through an image compression program. Lossless compression will reduce your image file sizes and retain the original quality.
Another option to improve performance is to use caching on your site. A website cache stores static HTML copies of website pages that don’t often change. This means users won’t need to make database calls to your site that reduce your website’s response time.
7. Call Attention to Important Elements
Not all website elements on your pages hold the same value. You likely don’t want someone to come to your site and never come back after finding what they need. You want to form a relationship with your readers, so they keep coming back.
The question is, how do you get people coming back for more? The most crucial element of your site to accomplish this is your call-to-action. These web elements drive your visitors to take some action.
This action can be anything from buying a product from your store to joining an email list. Your whole design should be centered around getting people to focus on these elements.
You can use session replay software to figure out where your visitors’ attention is going. This data will help you make small changes until your call-to-action elements get the attention you want them to.
There Are More Web Design Tips Out There
Getting your web design right is essential if you want your site to be successful. Use the web design tips above to get started on the right path.
Of course, there are many UX design tips and trends out there today. Browse through our blog to learn what those tips are.