If you don’t have the necessary experience and skills to make a successful site, the task of creating a website altogether can be rather overwhelming. Close to 50% of potential clients believe that the design of a website is one of the key factors in determining the credibility of a business.
This makes the best practices very important. Customers can easily differentiate between a well-designed website and a poorly constructed one. So it should be your objective to leave a positive impression on those who visit your website.
In this article, I intend to give your insight into the many facets of website design, like color utilization, navigation, marketing, etc. All the things your site needs if it wants to be successful. Such information should also help you in avoiding the many pitfalls that other web designers make.
That said, below are 6 of the very best website design practices today:
1. SEO or Search Engine Optimization
No website is complete without the simple, yet effective utilization of SEO. You want to implement this on your website, as it will determine the number of visitors that arrive on your site.
Effective SEO will ensure your site ranks as high as possible in the search engine listings. SEO works by using keywords or phrases that are sprinkled throughout a page in a compelling and readable fashion.
There are a number of elements that a search engine naturally seeks when visiting website pages. Stuff such as XML sitemaps, on-page SEO elements, and tags, etc.
This may come off as complicated at first, but I advise you, that you take the time to truly learn and master this stuff. There are countless free SEO eBooks that contain all the information you’ll ever need to know and learn about this topic.
2. Mobile-Friendly WebSite Design
You may create a website that looks excellent when viewed on your laptop or desktop system, but when viewed on your tablet or mobile phone, it may look disorganized, cluttered and difficult to view.
If your website is currently anything like this, then it could be what’s making you lose your leads. Around 80% of site viewers will lose interest in a website if it doesn’t display correctly.
When your site has a responsive design, it means that the site adjusts to the size of the browser that is viewing it. This makes it much easier for whoever is viewing the site, to navigate through it.
A successfully created responsive site is one that is able to serve all customers, irrespective of the device they view the site on, as it adjusts to their screen size.
Today, the vast majority of web surfers, access the internet via their mobile device, this means, having a mobile-friendly website is more important today than it has ever been.
Responsive website designs have been around for many years now. So it’s not exactly a new thing. Most site themes will have mobile-ready components attached to them now. So it shouldn’t be too difficult to get on board.
3. Use Shorter Paragraphs
You want to implement as many paragraphs as you see fit. Having longer paragraphs isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you have text broken down into many paragraphs, it makes it cleaner, tidier and easier to read.
When you start a new paragraph, you want to ensure that the content is new, and original, that way, web surfers can quickly skim through your site, and get the gist of what’s being expressed throughout it.
You want to eliminate text that’s not necessary, but at the same time, you don’t want to make your site content thin. I’d suggest, breaking it down, and making things more concise.
4. Minimize Text on Pages
Try not to fill your pages up with too much information.
Obviously, for every blog site, you’ll want to have as much text as feasible on your individual pages. But when it comes to your landing pages and home pages, you want to streamline things there.
The text contained on these pages should be kept to a minimum. This is a problem that too many web authors make.
It may be that you have a lot to say. You want your customers to know a bit about you, what your company is about, the various products you have on offer, etc.
That’s all good, but you want the dissemination of such information to be as concise as possible, kept to a minimum, so as not to clutter things.
5. Effective Colour Schemes
The color scheme of your website should embody your brand and your personality. If the text color and the background color, don’t contrast well, then it will make it difficult to read the information on your pages.
This can have two negative side effects, the first, is that it’ll make your website look less visually appealing. The second is that it’ll put off your potential clients, who’ll ultimately end up leaving your site.
The more appealing your site is, visually, the more likely your potential clients are to stick around and partake in what your site has to offer.
6. Use Shorter Sentences
It’s much easier to read shorter sentences, as opposed to longer ones.
If you fill your pages up with a lot of tests and use a lot of big words and large sentences, it can make things more difficult to read, making it difficult for potential clients to digest the information on your pages.
So take the time to mix things up. You can use large sentences, but make sure they’re accompanied by several shorter ones.
