These days, an online presence is vital for any business, even for brick-and-mortar stores that don't conduct e-commerce. Creating a website isn't especially difficult with the many website creation tools available. Whatever software you choose, keep these design principles in mind. 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. If potential customers land on your site but find it difficult to read or navigate on a mobile device, they may simply abandon you in favor of a competitor. Furthermore, a negative mobile user experience affects your website in search engine rankings, making it harder for users to find through a Google search — which brings us to our next point.
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.
Tip: Consider outsourcing your web development, branding, SEO, and content marketing to professionals who can offer advice and guidance in creating your website and landing pages.
If your business depends on people being able to contact you or call your sales team, put that information where they can find it easily. If you use social media to connect with customers, put your social links in the website header or footer, where they are easily found. Dan Veltri, co-founder and chief product officer of Weebly, advises limiting 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. Did you know? People scan webpages from top to bottom, left to right, so put your navigation menu where most people expect to find it: at the top of the page. Use dropdown menus under each top-level category for clean and organized navigation.
Paul Bolls, associate professor of strategic communication at the Missouri School of Journalism, said that readers need to be able to put information in context. If a site has too much information, it overloads the mind, making it unable to retain the new information. Your website is a medium, a publication. It should be home to a blog, vlog, podcast, resource center, gallery, or some combination of content types.
Read: How to increase both traffic and conversions. Read: The basics of SEO. All across the Orbit portfolio, they showcase how our website projects feature responsive design for clean presentations on various screen sizes. At the risk of getting geeky, your website should now have https in place. Websites designed to foster trust feature elements marketers and psychologists often call social proof. Social proof comes in the form of testimonials, client logos, customer stories, reviews and ratings, accreditations and certifications, ecommerce seals, statistics, and more.
Gather the trust signals that mean the most to your audience, populate portions of your homepage with them, and put them in the path visitors are bound to take. FreshBooks displays a tidy trio of credible client testimonials on their homepage to foster credibility.
Note: avoid creating a dedicated testimonials page. Read: How to gather and use testimonials. Great websites feature faces: pictures of people who work for or with your company, customers, and fans. Another effective way to introduce a human element is to present user-generated images, as PuraVida Bracelets elegantly does on their site.
Great websites have calls to action. They may be boxes, banners, links and other clickable elements. In any case, they appear where they make the most sense, stand out visually, and concisely communicate the value of taking action.
Sales do. And so, effective websites employ practical sales funnels that usher prospects forward in the buying process. Your website planning process should include sales funnel tactics and are fueled by forms, landing pages, contact pages, and thank you pages. Of course, the complete funnel is bound to include additional communications such as email, notifications, webinars, consultations, trials, etc.
You need to install Google Analytics, a free website analytics service that provides insights into how users find and use your website. Read: How to set up Google Analytics.
Serious marketers recognize a website that will deliver a bountiful return on investment needs to be created by experts. Hire professionals to fill in any gaps, making sure your team includes talent covering the key areas of website production, including the following:.
Remember RSS? Probably not. To users, it provided a way to subscribe; to publishers, it provided a simple syndication methodology. A good designer makes things user-friendly and knows what fonts, visuals, and types of navigation capture attention. They have a vision for how they all fit together. New designers are often tempted to cram as much excitement they can into a layout. But when too many elements are demanding our attention, we lose focus. Skilled web designers are thoughtful about the weight of each element and they know when to use restraint.
This sense of harmony also extends to the brand identity. Brand guidelines and a living style guide can help with consistency. Brand guidelines serve as a comprehensive explanation for everything from content to colors.
And a living style guide shows how everything looks together and makes site-wide changes easy and immediate. Typography is a vessel for thoughts. Along with the actual words, the shapes and stylization of letters convey meaning. Fonts should suit both the placement choice and tone of a design. The wrong font can undermine important content. Just ask the scientists who announced the discovery of the Higgs boson particle with a slideshow featuring Comic Sans. People had quite a bit to say about this choice of typography.
And who knows — maybe the naysayers were wrong? Be sure to know and like your reason for choosing a font. For large blocks of content and other important information, a straightforward font makes for better readability. Stylized typography should be treated like strong spices — add a little here and there for a bit of flavor. Build completely custom, production-ready websites — or ultra-high-fidelity prototypes — without writing a line of code. Only with Webflow.
Content should have logic, flow, and fit into a hierarchy. Your content should guide your audience to an inevitable conclusion, each piece building on what came before it.
Header tags should be used to structure content and help web crawlers rank your site for web searches. Visual elements should also be organized. Define sections with images and graphics that complement the written content. This includes your location, contact information, and description of your products. A great website design makes that information easily accessible. Company information is often found on an About Us page, as well as at the bottom of every page. Working with a firm like MARION that provides professional web design in Austin can help you ensure your site is as customer friendly as possible.
Make sure that contact information is up-to-date at all times. Name, address, and phone number NAP , is an important part of SEO , and one of the most vital features of great website design. Failure to keep this information current may prevent customers from contacting you, and may also negatively affect your ranking in search results.
Because mobile internet usage took the lead over desktop computers in with 63 percent of internet visits , this is one of the most important aspects of making a great website. Optimizing your pages is a major component of what makes a successful website. Search engines want to make the browsing experience as pleasant as possible for consumers. Part of what makes a great website is fast page load speed. The ability to assess conversion rates is another factor that can make a website great.
Build in ways to regularly test how many of your visitors turn into paying customers.
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