Setting yourself apart from the online competition begins with creating an outstanding website. A well-designed and structured website helps improve credibility. It enables businesses to create a lasting first impression on the site’s visitors which helps enhance engagement. Getting your web design right the first time around can also help save time and effort in redesigning your website.
The below website design tips are tried & tested methods to build a professional-looking site that will help boosts sales and revenue. So, let’s check them out. To find out how much it costs to build a WordPress website, read this blog!
#Latest Web Design Statistics
- 94% of all first impressions are related to design, visual appeal and website navigation. (CXL)
- 75% of consumers pass judgement on a company’s credibility based on their website’s design. (Kinesis)
- If the content or layout is unattractive, 38% of people will stop engaging with a website. (HubSpot)
- For an average website, 47% of users expect a load time of max 2 seconds. (Curatti)
- If a business has a poorly designed website on mobile, 57% of internet users won’t recommend it. (socPub)
- As high as 88% of online consumers won’t return to a site after a bad experience. (Inside Design)
- 70% of small business B2B websites lack a defined call-to-action. (WP Superstars)
How to Design a Good Website: Tips For Web Designing
1. Minimalistic and Clutter-free Homepage
Less is more when designing a homepage. Don’t overload your customers with too much information as soon as they land on the homepage. Instead, keep the content simple so customers can easily scan through the page and get a clear idea about your offerings.
- When designing the homepage, ensure to keep important content above the fold to limit scrolling.
- Add high-quality images, vector art or icons with bullets to explain your point rather than using blocks of text.
- Include a call-to-action button, but limit the number to max 2 and don’t go overboard.
- Finally, ensure that there is enough white space between text and elements to give the overall page a balanced look.
2. Keep Website Navigation Simple
Make it easier for the site visitors to find what they are looking for by keeping the navigation simple. This also helps search engine robots to index your web pages faster and more accurately. Linking your logo to the homepage is a common web design tip that is highly recommended.
- Be it a classical horizontal list or the hamburger menu, structure your website menu starting with the important sections.
- For a one-page website, an anchor menu can help visitors go to the section that they want to rather than scrolling endlessly.
- The back-to-the-top button is also useful and helps with website navigation.
Ensure your footer is well-designed and for better usability, you can add all the important links, including social media links, contact us and a shortened version of your menu.
3. Design With Visual Hierarchy
A great tip for designing a website is to use a visual hierarchy, which helps you to structure your website content much more efficiently. Use the right website layout to ensure important assets are highlighted, use bold to make certain text/sentences stand out, or use H1 tags to structure sub-points. A clear hierarchy makes it easier for users to follow a predefined path, which can be further accentuated with the right colour, contrast and spacing.
4. Embrace White Space
An essential tip for designing a website, white space refers to the blank space between the objects and text. It is also called ‘negative space’ and helps improve legibility making it easier for the user to focus on objects and text without being overwhelmed. When used properly, it can help make important sections of the website stand out; drawing the users attention to elements, words and images that you want them to focus on. White space makes the website design look much more appealing, minimising clutter and giving it an overall professional look.
5. Use Real Images
To make an impact, use real images of your staff, workspace or buisness rather than run-of-the-mill stock photos. Adding relevant images help to not only break the monotony of continuous text on a website but also helps boost customer engagement. Real images also add authenticity to your site and improve your brand’s credibility. Just ensure that the images you upload on your website are of high-quality and optimised to ensure that they won’t impact your site’s speed.
6. Leverage Social Proof
One of the web design tips that you should factor in when planning to create a website is social proof. This includes testimonials, case studies, certifications, badges, customer reviews or social share count. Displaying them on your website tells your customers that you are a legit business, which will help boost credibility and improve sales and conversions.
7. Mobile Optimisation
One of the most important website design tips that you can’t do without is to make sure that your users can access and navigate your website from different browsers and devices by making your site responsive. With Google’s mobile-first indexing criteria, optimising your website for mobile can also help boost your site’s ranking. Minimise page elements and scale down some of the assets to make the mobile version of your site less cluttered than the desktop version.
8. Faster Website Speed
Your website’s speed and performance play a vital role in enhancing the user experience.
- To improve website speed, use a good and reliable hosting provider such as Bluehost or SiteGround.
- To increase load time, use a content delivery network (CDN), which will help you deliver content to the user quickly by redirecting user requests to the nearest server.
- Optimising your site images is one of the other ways to improve your site’s speed.
- Enabling caching, implementing Gzip compression, and optimising your database are a few other techniques to boost website speed.
9. Engaging Website Content
Creating engaging content is also a part of website design which will help improve website traffic once it launches. Content is the driving force behind all marketing campaigns – SEO, social media and paid marketing.
- One of the key elements to consider when creating engaging content is to use bullets instead of blocks of text on landing pages.
- Hire an SEO agency that will help you determine the right keyword for different services and other important web pages.
- Use a brand style guide to ensure the tone of the content is consistent in all your messaging across web pages, social posts, emails and articles.
10. Above-the-fold Content
Above-the-fold content on your website should instantly grab the users attention when they land on your website. When talking about above-the-fold in web design, it can be any type of content, especially descriptive text accompanied by compelling images, persuading headings and a call-to-action. The above-the-fold content should spur your audience to take the desired action or make them curious to read on further. Engaging above-the-fold content will help you to reduce the bounce rate significantly. To get it right, check out these examples.
11. Avoid Carousels, Sliders and Tabs
Another good website design tip that you should follow is to avoid carousels, sliders and tabs. Research suggests that most users ignore the image carousels with the first slider/carousel getting a 1% click and others getting no click at all. Sometimes the carousels/sliders move so fast or have so many different messages that processing each piece of information can be difficult for the user. Tabs and accordions have the same problem, so it’s best to avoid them to improve the site’s usability.
12. Implement Call-to-action (CTA)
The call-to-action button is an important part of the business sales funnel and a professional web page design should have an eye-catching CTA. Use a contrasting colour with the background to make your CTA pop up. Every web page on your website should have at least one CTA. Make your CTA more descriptive rather than opting for the generic ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Buy Now’. The goal of a CTA is to create a sense of urgency so ensure that the CTA is clear & concise and aligned with the user’s intention.
13. Avoid False Bottoms
A false bottom is when a user believes that a particular page will not scroll down further despite there being more content below. This is one of the common UX mistakes, which can be easily rectified by using strong directional visual cues such as an arrow suggesting the user to scroll down further. You can also reduce too much white space between the content elements and avoid using full-screen hero content.
14. Simplify Your Contact Forms
When designing the contact form for your website, make sure that it is short, simple, and concise. Avoid asking for unnecessary information and keep only relevant fields in the form such as name, phone number, and email address. A contact form is an important element of the website that helps you generate leads, so optimising it is important. Ensure that the form is easy to find and include a clear call to action.
15. Use A/B Testing
When it comes to tips for creating a website, there is no one-size-fits-all. Through A/B testing, you can determine what works best for your site. More importantly, A/B testing can be done on different web design elements such as CTA, contact form, headlines, etc. This will help you to pick a more effective design version, enabling you to create a well-optimised website that leads to higher ROI.
We are a professional web design and development company in Dorking that can help you build a website as per your business needs and requirements. Check out the WordPress services that we offer, and for more information, get in touch!
