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Most entrepreneurs take web design for granted, forgetting that a website is one thing that can make or break their businesses. According to the report, as much as 95% of users claim that positive user experience is the most important factor when they visit a website.
At the same time, almost 40% of visitors will stop engaging if they find the content or layout of a website shabby and tatty. You obviously can’t overestimate the importance of web design in contemporary business, so it’s critical to figure it out to the fullest extent.
In this article, we will present to you 10 outstanding web design practices for business. Keep reading, and you will see everything there is to know about website creation.
1. Branding Consistency
As a company, you must have a branding stylebook that determines every single visual component. It’s a strategic document that serves as a manual for all design-related actions. Unfortunately, some webmasters don’t really pay attention to it.
Inconsistent web design is ruining user experience and damaging your business in the long run. It leaves customers confused and disoriented, so they can hardly remember and recognise your company the next time they see it. What you need to do is to keep all branding elements aligned, especially logos, brand colours, templates, etc.
Gregory Walberg, a web design specialist at Resumes Planet, explained it briefly: “Consistency is crucial. Each page must use the same sort of iconography, fonts, and colours. The same goes for content as each video or image needs to follow your branding style.”
2. Compelling CTAs
If you can convince prospects to visit your website and stick around for a while, the only thing left to do is to inspire them to engage. That’s where calls to action (CTA) step in to ensure conversions.
This web design component should be clearly separated from the rest of the content, but not hard to reach. On the contrary, CTAs must be large enough to catch the attention of your visitors and allow them to click the conversion button easily.
Colours play a major role in this field because you need to find a solution that fits your branding style and stands out from the rest of the content. Additionally, the colour of CTA buttons should form a sharp contrast with website background, making it impossible not to notice.
3. Webpage Loading Time
Online business is all about the speed and efficiency. For this reason, it is crucial to ensure fast website loading time and avoid losing impatient customers. A study revealed that the two-second loading time is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability.
How can you fulfill this demand? Well, there is a whole bunch of things you need to do, but we will show you only the most important steps:
- Minimise files: Reducing the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, you will ensure a smoother user experience.
- Asynchronous loading: Use this type of page loading because it gradually loads content from top to bottom.
- Defer loading: You can prevent larger files from loading until other web page components appear.
- Choose hosting carefully: Cheap but poor hosting will ruin your business hopes, so you better find a solution that can support your demands.
There are many other things to do here, but this is a good start. And if you are not sure about your website loading speed, feel free to test it and see how it ranks.
4. Search Engine Optimisation
Website creation is not strictly design-related. Content is another segment of web design that demands a lot of time and research, while search engine optimisation (SEO) adds the final touch to the success of your posts.
SEO gives you the chance to rank highly among similar websites, which is essential because users rarely ever look beyond the first page of results. It is based on keywords, crucial terms and phrases people use while searching for news, companies, products, etc.
Google’s Keyword Planner is the easiest way to discover relevant options in your niche and use them throughout your posts. Besides content, optimisation involves many other elements such as URLs, meta descriptions, titles, sitemaps, inbound links, image optimisation, etc.
5. Mobile Friendliness
A report shows that almost 60% of users won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. As a matter of fact, 97% of carts are abandoned due to distraction from unnecessary elements and multiple screens in mobile shopping carts.
What does it mean? It means that web design has to be mobile-focused in order to fulfill its ultimate business purpose. Even if your website looks incredible on a laptop, it won’t generate results in case you don’t optimise it for the smartphone experience. That’s why your site has to be created so as to fit the size and dimensions of each device.
Mobile optimisation also suggests removing cluttered pages. Avoid irrelevant elements and leave only components that really mean something to you and your visitors. Doing so, you will ensure high-quality experience and make your site much more productive.
6. Intuitive Navigation
Quality user experience is mostly the consequence of simple and easy navigation. Your goal is to provide prospects with a website that is highly intuitive and doesn’t take too much time to find the necessary features. Such websites follow the logic of standard user behavior, allowing potential customers to find what they need almost immediately.
Here are a few things you can do to ensure intuitive navigation:
- Narrow down the options to six features max.
- Highlight contact information in the upper right corner.
- Add ‘back to top’ buttons because they reduce scrolling time.
- Create search bars. That way, users can search for a specific piece of content without going back and forth through the site.
7. Don’t Neglect Email Marketing
Email may be the oldest channel of digital marketing, but it’s definitely not the least important or obsolete. According to research, $1 spent on email campaigns generates $44 of return on investment, making it one of the most profitable marketing tactics. You should exploit this channel to generate additional website leads.
Provide subscribers with a highly relevant content that contains a link to the website. If you can send the right message at the right time, most receivers will click the URL and visit your website to explore the offer more thoroughly. At the same time, your website must contain a clearly visible email sign-up form.
8. Utilise Social Media
With over 2.5 billion users worldwide, social media have become a quintessential marketing tool. Facebook, Instagram, and similar platforms allow you to reach global audiences almost instantly, so you need to utilise social networks to promote your business.
In terms of web design, it means you ought to add social share buttons to your website. This feature gives website visitors the opportunity to share your content on their social media accounts, thus increasing brand awareness online. However, we recommend you place social share buttons in the website footer because it will increase the time spent on page and decrease bounce rates.
9. Post Quality Images
Humans are visual beings who perceive visual content much better than plain text or audio content. For instance, people follow visual instructions over 300% better than written instructions. In such circumstances, visual content becomes a huge part of web design.
First of all, beautiful images will make your website more attractive. Secondly, infographics and similar formats improve user engagement, which equals more time spent on page. At the same time, you will reduce bounce rates and improve search ranking in general.
All these reasons prove you ought to take visual content creation very seriously. Use professional equipment, mind the brightness and colours, and don’t ever publish boring stock photos. Instead, create your own images to stand out from the crowd of online competitors.
10. Colour Scheme
A colour scheme depends mostly on the overall branding strategy, but it’s important to highlight this feature once again. Your text and background should include contrasting colours that create an eye-pleasing visual solution, ensuring a more comfortable user experience.
Conclusion
Your website is the first instance a prospect will check out before making the decision whether to buy something or not, which means it has to be flawless. Our post showed you 10 outstanding web design practices for business. Remember our suggestions and feel free to apply them in your projects – it will make your websites more beautiful and highly effective.
“The opinions expressed by BizWitty Contributors are their own, not those of BizCover and should not be relied upon in place of appropriate professional advice. Please read our full disclaimer."
