Web Design Services

Important Factors to Keep in Mind for Web Design

1. Branding Consistency

Just like a brick-and-mortar store tells a story about your brand, so does your website. Right from the colour schemes, and fonts, to the tone of copies, and design, everything on your site tells something about your brand. There’s a rule in marketing that your target audience needs to see or hear something at least seven times before they remember it. Your overall site needs to have a branding consistency so that visitors can better recall your brand and develop a certain level of trust.

Choosing a site design that resonates with your brand values requires considerable research on your part. You need to choose fonts and colours that are industry-appropriate. For example, the colour schemes and fonts for a celebrity gossip website will be very different from a corporate banking website. You need to choose what your audience would be comfortable with and what will evoke the right emotions. Don’t overdo it with colours. Have three colours and keep them consistent across all your pages.

2. User-Focused Design

You’re not just building a website for your brand but mainly for your customers. And that is why, you need to look beyond the aesthetics to appeal to visitors in terms of a user-friendly layout, clean interface, and clear copies.

Decide who your potential customers are and what your site is trying to accomplish. It can be to increase conversions, provide product/service information, provide a window into the brand history and story, or be a primary source for job applications for prospective employees.

For example, for a SaaS brand, the primary goal is signups and the secondary goal is to educate visitors about the product. The starting point would be to get everyone who is contributing to the website on board, right from UX and design teams, content writers, SEO specialists, and developers to take in their input. Create buyer personas based on audience profiling to research user problems and how your website solves them.

For website developers and designers, the way to achieve the website goals would be by having clear CTAs for sign-up and images and visuals that are informative about the product use. If you’re unsure about how to proceed, partnering with a reputable SEO agency like AN SEO AGENCY can help you align your website’s design with effective SEO strategies.

3. Seamless Navigation

Easy navigation is a testament to the user-friendliness of any website. Some of the best ways to achieve that would be by having clear and understandable categories that are relevant to your website goals.

Always, always have a search bar so that users can easily find whatever they are looking for on the website. It can either be the ‘About Us’ page, the location page, career pages, a piece of content or a news article. Some other practices include having a navigation footer to make it easy for users to get to the top of the page and breadcrumbs to track user journeys.

Just don’t make it complex in the name of design innovation. Most sites practice a user-friendly way of having the navigation bar in a horizontal position at the top of the page in their desktop design. If you do try to do something drastically different, it might confuse the user.

4. Effective Visual Hierarchy

On-page hierarchy is placing your website elements in such a manner that allows the users to consume the most information first and so on. For example, you would notice that most sites offer the most important information in their H1 tags. The headings are brief but include power words and CTAs. The more important the information, the more highlight it should get. You highlight it through colours, contrasts, size, etc., communicating to the users what to focus on first.

You can measure user behaviour on your WordPress website using heatmap analysis. They tell you where the consumers are spending their time, and if they are interacting with the elements you need them to. If the users are ignoring a particular section, you can use visual elements to draw their attention.

5. Mobile Optimization

Is your site providing a positive experience across devices? If not, then it is time to consider designing a user-friendly website platform that functions well on smartphones and tablets too.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, chances are a significant chunk of your traffic will check you out on their mobile devices.

For ecommerce stores, that number will be higher. A well-designed and responsive website for mobile means your website has accessible menus on phones, simple designs for better speed, larger buttons and clear CTAs, and a compressed layout of images and videos.

6. SEO-Friendly Design

How you design your website will play a crucial role in how Google and other search engines rank the same. For example, if you include too many images and animation for their aesthetic values, chances is that your website’s loading speed will be too long, resulting in a lower search ranking.

To consistently rank at the top, you need to follow the SEO protocols for web design. These include,

• Creating keyword-optimised content
• Having headings and subheadings
• Website sitemap to make it easy for search engine crawlers to understand
• Using alt text for images
• Include title tags and meta descriptions
• High-quality images to reduce loading time

To create SEO-optimised web design, it is ideal to consult an agency that specialises in web design services as well as SEO. Agencies like AN SEO AGENCY are experts in crafting SEO-optimized websites and can help your website reach higher search engine rankings.

7. Dynamic and Readable Content

Dynamic content means providing visitors with a personalised experience with content. For example, consider having different pages depending on the user’s location and IP address. A site visitor from one region will have a different experience with your site than a visitor from another.

While you may design a great website, if you clutter it with too much information and words, your website won’t yield results. The idea is to find a balance between the content, style and functionality of your website design. Avoid having text-heavy pages and keep the content simple enough to read. Some other tips to consider while writing web copies are:

• Having consistent fonts
• Break text-heavy paragraphs into smaller chunks and use bullet points to make copies scan able
• Have contrasting colours with the background and avoid combinations that are difficult to read.
• Have space between copies and headings to avoid text clutter.

8. Optimized CTAs

How are you facilitating conversions with web design?

Considering that ultimately, all the efforts that you invest in your site are to persuade users to take action, CTAs form an integral part of the web design. CTAs can either include signing up for a newsletter or signing up for a product trial, downloading a lead magnet, filling up a form, etc. CTAs at the right places and intervals can help you convert visitors into paying customers.

Some practices you can adopt to convert CTAs are:

• Highlighting the CTAs to make them stand out.
• Having CTA in the middle as well as the end of the blog article.
• Place CTAs on every webpage so that visitors don’t have to go to the homepage to convert.
• Be consistent with placing the type of CTAs to avoid confusing the users
• Have CTAs that align with your goals. If your goal is to increase your subscribers, place “subscribe” CTAs or if your goal is to increase your customers, increase the placement of “Sign up” CTAs.

9. A/B Testing

Chances are that a single website design may not work for all your prospects. To test different designs for different target audiences, you can practice A/B testing. It is a method of comparing different versions of a webpage to check which one resonates best with your visitors and performs best to achieve your goals. Some of the A/B testing practices include having different Headings, Hero images, taglines, CTAs, etc.

You can then see which headline garners more visitors, which sections encourage the users to stay and check out the rest of your web pages and which other visual content incites positive responses. There are various tools that allow you to perform A/B testing. You can then collect data, and make decisions based on the same which works best for all your future website designs.