Website Design 101 – 5 Steps To Design Websites That Convert

Your business website gives you the ability to share relevant information about your products or services with customers and other interested companies. Whether you’re designing one or many, you need to design websites that convert — period.

For that reason, the competition is fierce as companies from different corners of the Internet fight to remain visible in search engines. With that in mind, how can you keep your brand relevant in the highly saturated market?

It all comes down to establishing an effective web design. Beyond having an aesthetic appeal, a good web design helps determine how your viewers will respond to your business. To that end, here are different ways you can improve and optimize your web design:

Websites That Convert Tip #1: Implement a Responsive Design

A responsive design means that your website is accessible and usable on every device. This is a vital element in your strategy as optimizing your site for both desktop and mobile users can help improve your ranking on search engines.

Not to mention, more and more people are active on their mobile devices, and this ever-growing demographic may soon dominate the online retail industry. As such, implementing a user-friendly and responsive design for mobiles will widen your reach and ultimately lead to higher conversions.

Websites That Convert Tip #2: Up your Website’s Ante by Giving it a Personality

Objectively speaking, all websites have personalities. However, a well-planned design allows your brand’s character to be clearly translated through your website. That means skipping the cookie-cutter, build-your-own website platforms and investing in a web designer that can modify your website based on your company’s vision.

This includes incorporating design features, color schemes, widgets, style elements, text, and imagery that would also appeal to your target market. For instance, an apparel brand can give off a chic or street-smart vibe, family-owned restaurants may feel homey, and financial services may appear trustworthy. Either way, letting your website’s personality shine is one way to attract valuable traffic.

Websites That Convert Tip #3: Use JavaScript Sparingly

JavaScript is great for adding dimensions and enhancing the dynamics of your website’s design, as it allows you to integrate animations and videos. However, search engines find it difficult to read heavy use of JavaScript. Also, JavaScript doesn’t work smoothly on mobile devices, which lowers the user experience and ultimately reduces your ranking.

As a modern alternative, it’s better to make use of HTML5 as it is the fifth evolution of HTML. It retains a simplistic design that makes it more readable for search engines. Meanwhile, it also provides powerful new features for more sophisticated needs, such as animation and videos that are also friendly for mobile use.

Websites That Convert Tip #4: See the Design from Your Customer’s Perspective

There are two types of customers – those who know what they want to buy and those who wish to browse. It’s essential to have a website that can cater to both categories without being overwhelming for one or the other. To achieve the right balance, focus on the search functionality of your website.

An optimized design can easily categorize your products or services and showcase them on your website’s landing page cleanly. This is to ensure that navigation feels effortless for your customers. For example, you can add sub-pages to your navigation bar instead of cramming too many items into a single page.

Websites That Convert Tip #5: Optimize Your Images Using SEO

Many businesses know how to use the ideal keywords in their content copies properly, but many tend to overlook the optimization of their image or video content. This means that you have to ensure your images meet the standard of 30 to 100KB with a resolution of 72 dpi.

The placement of the images or videos also matters as it should be on an appropriate page. If not, bots may see it as an unhelpful site, which will hurt your ranking. Not to mention you can also incorporate keywords in the alt text section of the image to boost your site’s SEO even further.

In Conclusion

Effective web design isn’t just about reducing waste – it should be about prioritizing what matters in your message without sacrificing detail or your concept. When your output is too little, your product becomes unclear and will eventually have your audience scrolling past it.

Your site should have a clean and readable design and that applies to either typography or imagery. The goal is to use these as focal points to achieve a functional design. We’re a web design agency based in Reno; get in touch with us today to see how we can help!