When your website is competing in a saturated market, it’s essential that your web design follows best practices to make your site stand out from others and attract audiences. Here are seven best web design practices to follow.
- Keep Your Target Audience in Mind
At every stage of your website design, your target audience should be kept clearly in mind. It’s all too easy to get hung up on the concept of a site without thinking about the end user.
- Use High-Quality Images
Incorporating images into your website is recommended but pay attention to the quality of your images before you upload them. According to Business2Community, a poorly presented image will damage the impression people have of a brand.
- Consistent Branding
If you want your audiences to understand what you’re about as a brand, you need to reinforce this with your logo, messages and use of colours and fonts. You won’t achieve this if you don’t follow a consistent approach to your branding throughout your site, so pay attention to every detail.
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4. A Simplified Layout
An easy-to-navigate website with a simplified layout is one of the cornerstones of web design best practice. If you’ve got a lot to say on your site, this can be challenging to achieve, so consult a Brand Strategy Agency, such as www.reallyhelpfulmarketing.co.uk/specialist-services/brand-strategy-agency/ for example, to get across what you want to say as succinctly as possible.
- Enhance the User Experience
A web designer must always step into the minds of the target audience when putting a site together so that the result enhances the user experience. Intuitive design, a compelling story and easy navigation help enhance the user experience.
- Strong Call to Action
What do you want your website visitors to do? Once you’ve decided what the call to action should be, ensure that the design of your site makes it easy and obvious for the user to complete that desired call to action.
- Follow SEO Strategies
A visually appealing website on its own won’t bring the traffic in, so it’s vital that SEO best practice is followed as part of the web design process. This means the site should be designed to make it easier to find during searches using tactics such as internal linking, proper labelling and keeping site load times in check.
Balancing SEO with user experience
Good web design and good search performance go hand in hand, but they need balancing. Ranking well is no longer just about traditional optimisation. Brand authority and user experience now play a large part, and a site built for its visitors tends to see search benefits follow naturally.
Authority comes from two directions. A loyal community that regularly reads, comments on and shares your content builds trust, while relevant and timely content keeps that trust earned in search. Inviting respected guest contributors and encouraging links to your content can strengthen both.
Some features that seem user-friendly need care. Infinite scroll and click-to-expand sections can make it harder for search engines to crawl a page if they are overused. Responsive design, on the other hand, improves usability across devices without that trade-off. Writing copy based on keyword research into what your target audience is searching for keeps the site useful to people and visible to search engines at the same time.
How design choices drive conversions
Good practice in web design pays off in conversions, not just appearance. A site has only seconds to make a good impression, so it must capture attention immediately and keep visitors on the page. Colours and visuals influence emotions, purchase decisions and brand recognition, so choose visual elements that reflect your business and speak to your audience.
Usability is just as important. A logical navigation structure helps people reach information quickly, and the desired call to action should be obvious and consistent on every page. Where a site serves several audiences, separate navigation paths can guide each type of visitor.
Content needs to be easy to read and easy to skim, because many users are short of time and scan for what they want. Suitable fonts, headings, subheadings and bullet points help, as does a clean, simple layout without too many styles or too much information. Finally, pages must load quickly, because visitors will not wait for a slow site.
Setting goals before the design begins
Good practice starts before any design work is done. Be clear about the purpose of the site. Do you want people to learn about your services and then get in touch, or do you need a fully automated ecommerce store that sells your products? The answer shapes almost every decision that follows.
Next, understand your target audience, including their preferences and behaviour, so the design can be tailored to appeal to them. User experience covers how the site works in practice: how easy it is to move between pages, how quickly the site and each page load, and how accessible it is for people with reading difficulties.
Visual design is where your branding comes in. Your logo, brand colours, tone of voice and language should all be consistent, and the images you choose need to suit the people you want to reach. Working through each of these points with your designer gives you a site you can be proud of.