If you’re reading this article, chances are you either need a new website design because you’re starting a business or you’re redesigning your existing one because it’s not meeting your expectations. Whatever your reasons, a solid website design is the cornerstone of any other digital marketing strategies. It’s also a necessity in a world where even a vast majority of local business transactions start with an internet search. Let’s look at some website design tips.
Not a lot has changed as the basic, solid principles of good website design. We’ll go over these first and then touch on a few of the latest trends in web design. No single article on this subject can be comprehensive of everything you’ll need to know, but below you will find many sound principles that will get you off to a good start on creating a professional online presence that boosts your brand and grows your sales.
Use a Modern Framework for Your Website Design
A framework is essentially the structure of files, folders and standardized code that supports your website development. A good, modern framework will be flexible enough to allow you to make changes to your website design without having to recode the entire thing from scratch.
Some popular frameworks around which website development can be undertaken are Foundation, Bulma, Semantic UI, Materialize and Bootstrap. There is no one best framework to use for building a website from scratch, and unless you are planning on doing professional website development for others, you may not even have to worry about this step. There are website builders online that will already have a modern framework and coding incorporated into it. If you wish to have low-level control over how website development proceeds from the start, however, then you’ll want to determine what framework will be best for your purposes.
Visual Design Elements
How much of the basic design structure of a website you need to determine will depend on whether you’re starting one from scratch or working from a good selection of templates. Either way, you want a layout with a clear navigation structure and pages of content that flow naturally.
Having sufficient white space is critical. It causes the users’ eyes to go where the important content is on the page. Remember that white space doesn’t have to be white. Gradient colors are seen as a trend in website design for 2020, so you can get creative in this regard with a color palette of your choosing. Just be sure that your color of choice sufficiently contrasts with that of any text or images comprising the content on the page.
Obviously, designing a website that is visually appealing is at the core of successful website development. The content on your site is what should sell visitors on signing up for your newsletter or ordering your products or whatever action the site is trying to get them to take. That said, they won’t get to the content if they’re visually repelled by your website design. In this regard, there are some basic visual website development pointers:
-Simple Is Better – Don’t use too fancy a type font that you think is pretty but that some users might find hard to read. Choose fonts with both attractiveness and readability in mind. Also, break up your text with headlines and subheadlines. No one likes to read a wall of text. Keep the pages of your website design clean and uncluttered in keeping with the white space advice above.
-Be Consistent – Don’t have radical departures in page layout, color scheme, navigation button placement and other factors from page to page. In fact, have a consistent color palette and layout and have your logo along with any motto or tagline for your company on each page since this helps build your brand identity.
-Responsiveness – You need to make sure your website looks as good on a mobile device as it does on a laptop or desktop. This has more to do with the first point above in choosing a framework that has responsive coding that rescales it for different size screens.
Design With SEO in Mind
Saying that your website should be designed with SEO as a major factor could be seen as advice that covers a dizzying array of website design recommendations. Many of the Google algorithm updates over the years have stressed the importance of attributes such as fast-loading webpages, high-quality content, mobile-friendly design, simple navigation, the presence of an XML sitemap to make crawling your site’s pages easier and a host of other factors.
In website development, most of these factors that enhance a website’s attractiveness, performance and overall usability to its visitors will also make it look better to the search engines. Thus saying “perform website development with SEO in mind” includes a grab bag of sound recommendations that any website design should have anyway if it does a decent job at converting visitors into leads and customers.
Get on the Video Bandwagon
As recently as 2018, 87 percent of online marketers use video content, and 51 percent of marketing professionals say video yields the best return on investment. Video has long been known to improve audience engagement over text or the combination of text and static images.
Whether you produce or hire someone to produce a corporate video, product promotional videos, explainer videos or how-to videos related to your products, they are a powerful addition to any website. Because they enhance audience engagement, they keep people on your website longer, which makes it yet another tactic for improving your SEO. Producing video content on a regular basis can do more than simply improve your website’s effectiveness at converting visitors into customers. YouTube has over a billion users, which makes your own YouTube channel an excellent promotional tool to drive people to your website.
Dark Mode Option
You may have noticed that some major websites now have a dark theme option. Twitter is one example of this. When you’re laying in bed scanning your Twitter feed, it’s nice to be able to select this option to not have a bright screen straining your eyes and keeping you awake.
This is seen as a trend in the world of website development that will only get more prevalent. As such, it’s something that you may have to add to your site to keep up with competitors at some point. That said, as long as you’re doing a new website design now, why not incorporate this capability into it from the outset? It’s still a new enough development in website design that users may be impressed that your site has this capability. You will need to refer to the guidelines for the particular design language and framework that you’ll use for your website design to implement it, but it may be well worth it.
Improving Personalization
Advances in AI and machine learning are enabling websites to be more personalized in the content they deliver to visitors. This is complemented by web cookies, which have existed for a while now. Basically, these save some information about you after each visit to a website. Users may find cookies convenient because it enables them to save their login information, but website owners can use them to identify particular users.
There are various ways this can be implemented when doing website development, and you might want to incorporate multiple techniques for maximum personalization. It can be done in a behavior-based way. For example, if a specific visitor had purchased a given product from your website on a previous visit, then you could set your site up to show them content that’s related to it when they return. You could also offer people a small incentive to fill out quizzes or profile information that tells you more about their content preferences. Retrieving location information from visitors may also be a helpful method in knowing what content to send their way. If you know they live in Florida, for example, pushing content related to sunscreen may be more productive than displaying your selection of snow shovels.
Solid Website Design for 2020
The basics of good, sound website design have not changed much over the past couple of years. Improvements in technology have made certain enhanced marketing capabilities possible, which may mean you have to implement them to stay competitive. These include things such as improved personalization of a user’s experience on your website, optimizing for voice search in our phone-based internet culture and other new trends. That said, the basics of good website design are still largely what they have been for a few years now.
You want an attractive website design that has efficient coding, a simple, intuitive layout and navigation, and uncluttered webpages, so they draw attention to relevant content and load quickly. By incorporating additional on-page SEO strategies into your webpages, such as high-quality content with relevant keywords, your site will be found by targeted traffic, and it should have a good chance of converting them from a visitor into a new customer.
D2 Branding Website Design of Tulsa provides a customized marketing strategies for businesses to capture new customers, interact with current customers, while growing your audience and customer base!
