6 Best Practices For Website Design
Building a website used to be a long and laborious task; these days, a few clicks and you can build yourself a new website. But these quick DIY websites rarely offer more than a single page with your name and contact information. This means that not only are people extremely unlikely to find your site unless you send them there yourself, they’re also not very likely to be impressed by what they see. It takes users less than a second to decide if they like your site or not – which can mean the difference between landing a life-long customer or sending them running to your competition. We’ve spent years building custom websites both big and small, all aimed at providing the best possible user experience (UX) to ensure your visitors turn into customers. Here are our top 6 best practices for website design.
Choose the Right Color Scheme
While you may be tempted to just pick some random colors, choosing the color scheme for your website is a very important part of following best practices for website design. Your best bet is to follow your own branding; look to your own logo for inspiration. When customers see your website, they expect it to match your branding. Worried that your logo consists of too dark of colors? Your website can be primarily white with these darker colors as accents.
Don’t Overdo the Text
One area where many businesses fail to follow the best practices for website design is by overdoing it on the amount of text on their pages. Blog posts, of course, don’t count – they can be upward of 2,000 words so long as you’re not being repetitive. Filing your website with big chunks of text that are difficult to read can be a huge turn-off for visitors. Instead, try to keep your sentences and paragraphs short, and include relevant information.
Utilize Visuals
High-quality visuals, whether they are pictures or infographics, help to create visual interest and break up the text on your page. They are also a great way to help potential customers understand your product by allowing them to see exactly what they are getting.
Have a Clear CTA
CTAs, or calls to action, are key in helping to encourage people to make a purchase on your website. Not only should your pages include CTAs, they should also be big and bold. Making sure they are easy to see and click is one of the most effective best practices for website design to drive conversions.
Simply the Navigation
It should never be difficult for a website visitor to find the information that they are looking for. Having awkward or difficult website navigation can be an instant turn-off for customers that sends them right to your competitors instead. Best practices for website design include putting your navigation bar horizontally along the top of your web pages. This is where people expect them to be, and can help keep them on your page searching for exactly what they need.
Optimize for Mobile
These days, the majority of website visitors are using their phones to access your site. This means that if your site isn’t mobile optimized, their experience is likely negative. Non-optimized sites do not display information correctly, making text hard to read and nav bars difficult to click on. Best practices for website design always includes mobile optimization to avoid these issues.
Don’t Forget about SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of ensuring that your website isn’t just user-friendly, it’s search engine-friendly as well. This makes it more like that search engines will list your business on the first page of results when someone searches for a term that is relevant to what you do. Best practices for website design includes SEO, which involves a number of different elements. These include usability, mobile optimization, keyword optimization, internal links, and headlines.
Successful Businesses Never Neglects Web Design
Following best practices for website design isn’t just important – it is absolutely vital to keeping your business competitive in your industry. Proper website design choices are going to make a huge difference in whether or not your site helps you to draw in new customers.
If you’re looking to build the best website possible for your business, Gulf Coast Web is here to help. Gulf Coast Web has 25 years of experience in managing all types of digital design and marketing campaigns – even for companies outside of our immediate area. Our staff consists of highly-trained digital design advertising professionals who are both passionate about their jobs and excel at what they do. Contact us today to book a consultation with our team. We look forward to outlining exactly how we can help you grow your business with our digital media agency services.