5 Easy Steps To Improve Your Web Design
First impressions are everything. Your web design can make or break people’s first impression of your brand. You’ve spent countless hours brainstorming ways to drive traffic to your site, but it only takes 50 milliseconds for people to form on opinion on it.
Interacting with your website should be an intriguing, positive experience. With these key elements, you can drive traffic and keep people on your site for longer:
Incorporate multimedia
Your company’s website should tell a story about your team and your mission. Get creative with your web design – multimedia is in. Even with riveting words and headings, all-text is most likely to scare away visitors. Users can’t engage with text. Pictures are always effective additional content, but picking the right ones is a skill that takes prior knowledge. If you can, find a photographer who can take quality pictures of your company’s work and space vs. using stock photography. Authenticity is key for building trust.
All Into the Blue-created websites include powerful imagery from the get-go that lines up with the brand’s mission. Like these for example:
Beyond photography and text, go above and beyond, look into creating videos and other interactive content. Upload a demo reel of your company’s best projects over the past year and showcase your talents. Short and sweet infographics can also give visitors a clear idea what your brand is all about. Adding interactive content like polls, surveys, and calculators give the visitor incentive to keep exploring your site.
Make your site easy to navigate
The more you try to complicate or clutter your web design, the less user-friendly it becomes. Users should always know where they are and never have to scramble to find their next stop. Plan out your navigation menu on a document or spreadsheet to ensure everything is where it needs to be. Some tips to improve your user interface are:
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Stick to web conventions.
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Be consistent with your pages and your hierarchy.
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Make the most important elements stand out.
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Replace “404 Error” with more user-friendly language.
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Create a visual sitemap.
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Make sure your links function properly.
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Give clickable photos alt attributes.
Even more important than desktop design is mobile design. In 2018 so far, over half of users visited sites on a mobile device, and the number is only increasing. Because of this, an easy mobile design is crucial. Navigation using hamburger menus, colors, and indentations on mobile can all help the user. See how mobile-friendly these Into the Blue-created sites are:
Use your web design as a SEO tool
The best web design in the world won’t matter unless your page is ranking in search engines. One of the most necessary steps in using your web design as a SEO tool is creating a XML sitemap. Sitemaps are basically a coded version of your menu that you submit to Google. Without one, Google doesn’t really know you exist, and that means no traffic. Codes aren’t the only way to boost your SEO – it also depends on the quality of your content. Having a video on your homepage increases your chance at appearing in a front-page Google search by 53 times.
Other content to consider adding to your site:
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Blog posts
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Social media plugins
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Industry-related articles
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Webinars
Create a call-to-action (CTA)
The ultimate mission of your website is to drive sales and promote your business. Using your navigation strategies, the user should always know where to go next. To do this, you need to understand how web design operates as a conversion funnel. There are 3 types of CTA web content:
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Top-of-the-funnel: General, educational content. This includes industry trends and information that don’t explicitly mention your business.
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Middle-of-the-funnel: Why your brand. This is where you explain the benefits of your brand specifically, and what unique services you bring to the table.
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Bottom-of-the-funnel: Connecting people to your brand directly. These CTA’s usually offer one of your services instead of just educating people about your brand. These include demos, consultations, trials and more.