A well-designed site is a vital tool for any business that wants to succeed. Your business site will tell your customers everything they need to know about the brand itself — if your site is poorly designed, visually unappealing, difficult to navigate, and just doesn’t run smoothly, your potential client might back right out of the site…and of their decision to work with you.
On the other hand, since your site is like a flagship for your brand, the effective design actually enhances the customer’s desire to pursue engaging with and investing in that business.
There’s a wide audience out there to be reached with a good website. As much as 97% of customers seek out information about brands online, and the percentage of online purchases is growing exponentially every year. Whether you’re selling online or just using your site as a portal to give clients more information and direct them to your brick and mortar store, your site’s design can make or break your business.
Obviously, this is especially true these days, when consumers are more often staying home and ordering in.
Here are four hot tips to help you design your site in a way that does your brand justice:
Opt For Simple Design
The simple design is an evergreen web design trend. This is a fact for a reason — a simple design is a great way to create an effective website.
Keeping your site simple allows your visitors to focus on what they’ve come for, rather than distracting them by too much going on.
Here’s how:
- Strip down the design elements on your site to focus on and highlight the most important aspects, such as products, contact information, and the like.
- Keep your content brief. Including bullet points and lists increases readability and interest.
- Limit graphics, videos, moving elements, and your color palette to keep your clients focused on the next step in the buyer’s journey.
- Include plenty of white space or negative space in the layout to allow your important elements room to breathe.
Include Consistent Branding
If you’re trying to build a business and push it towards real success, branding is something you can’t afford to ignore. Your branding develops a relationship between the customer and your brand, establishing a connection, and encouraging engagement.
Obviously, it’s very important that your branding remains consistent across all platforms that allow you to connect with your audience. This includes social media, in-person or in-store interactions, your customer service, and your website.
Here’s how:
- Establish a branding style guide that outlines colors, fonts, graphics, and other choices in visuals for your brand.
- Include your company logo design at the top left of every page of your website. Most consumers expect this to be clickable, allowing them to return to the homepage if they get lost.
- Stick to your color palette, as long as it allows for readability and simplicity. If you need to add in different colors, make sure that they don’t come across as being too distracting.
- Keep a consistent tone. This includes how your content is worded, as well as ensuring that you hold true to your brand’s values and message.
Concentrate On User Experience
We’ve all had the experience of visiting a site that was clearly not putting its audience’s interests first. For example, a site that is too slow to load makes us want to back right out. A site that is difficult to navigate is frustrating to use. A site that gives us a lot of extra information but not the most important facts makes us feel like we’re wasting our time.
All of that and more is tied into the user experience. Making certain that your priority is your customer will dictate how you design the UX.
Here’s how:
- Keep your loading speed down. A simple design will help with this, as will optimizing your images and making sure not to include too many elements.
- Prioritize the necessary information. What are your customers visiting your site for? Make sure they can reach that information quickly, in a way that makes sense.
- As you promote your products, do so in a way that isn’t in-your-face, rather emphasizing the benefit to the customer.
Curate Your Content
It’s tempting to jam a lot of content onto a business site, in the name of making sure that each customer has every single thing they could possibly need. But, in fact, including anything and everything can be detrimental to the effectiveness of your site.
Picking and choosing the content you include is a big part of making your overall web design effective for your business.
Here’s how:
- Don’t make your content top-heavy. If you include too much information, you will overload your customer. Cut sentences and paragraphs short, use lists and bullet points, and remember that your customer may very well just be skimming the content.
- Include CTAs to encourage conversion — but don’t let them become obnoxious or overboard.
- Ensure the accuracy of every piece of content on your site.
- Include SEO keywords in a way that makes sense, rather than just jamming them in on the flimsiest pretext. If you can’t fit more complicated keywords into the content in an organic way, create connected content to post on your blog and make sure that the articles are linked so your customer can get more information if they want it.
Creating a truly effective site for your brand can be complicated — but it is possible! And the success you’ll see will likely be directly tied to tips like these.
