5 Essential Web Design Tips
How many times have you visited a website just to leave a few seconds later because of its outdated and unattractive design? It’s hardly uncommon. And as a business owner, you need to pay close attention to how people react to your website, as it can have a significant impact on your company’s success.
Think of your website as a window into your company. If it doesn’t create the right first impression because it looks and feels dated, it’ll sour visitors on your brand indefinitely. And while you might not want to invest much time or money into design, the truth is that good design pays for itself by providing great user experiences and allowing your hard-earned visits to return additional value through more conversions.
To help you make progress with your website design, let’s look at five essential web design tips. Here they are:
Invest in high-performance infrastructure
You can put immense energy and expertise into optimizing your site’s design, polishing it to a mirror shine with extensive Optimizely-style A/B testing and ahead-of-the-curve techniques, but it won’t help you much if the fundamentals aren’t solid. After all, a site that doesn’t load promptly will lose most visitors before it even finishes rendering — and all the glorious design work that follows will have few chances to win people over.
Due to this, your first step here should be to ensure that your infrastructure is good enough to serve as the foundation for your hard-earned website, and that process starts with having appropriate hosting. Most website owners start with generic hosting, looking for ways to cut costs, but that’s the wrong approach for the long term.
Does your hosting require you to manually roll out updates? Is it geared towards your specific CMS? Is it scalable? Unless you have a compelling reason not to, you should be using cloud hosting: it’s simply a better value proposition. Look around for a managed hosting service with CMS-specific functions (if you run Magento, for instance, you could trial the Magento-targeted Cloudways tier). A first-time migration will usually be part of the deal, but if you’re determined to keep your current hosting, at least ensure that you have enough performance in place. If not, ask for an upgrade.
Create a minimalistic homepage
The homepage is one of the most crucial pages on your website. It sets the tone for the rest of the site, introduces the fundamentals of your brand identity, and plays a massive role in determining whether a given visitor will stick around or go elsewhere. It won’t always be the landing page for your site, of course, but most of your links should go there to build domain and brand authority, so you need to treat it as your centerpiece.
It’s possible to try too hard with a homepage, though, as you’ll know from general internet use. You’ve surely seen websites that throw content at you from the outset. This typically indicates a lack of confidence in what’s being presented — so if you believe your brand is worthwhile, you’re better off keeping things simple.
To whatever extent you can, focus on minimalism and honing web design components such as visual hierarchy to steer users towards the most crucial elements. Shapes, sizes, colors, layouts: used well, these things will all help you make your information easier to absorb and your website more welcoming.
Make navigation simple
Per Forbes, the navigation structure of your website inevitably impacts many things, like conversions, sales, and bounce rates. It’s easy to understand why: if a visitor can’t quickly find what they’re searching for, they’ll leave, and you’ll miss out on a potentially-solid lead. Your target for your navigation design should be to ensure that every visitor to every page on your site can find what they’re looking for within three clicks (assuming you have it, that is).
So how can you improve your navigation? Well, the biggest thing you can do is polish your main menu, ensuring that the user can readily locate key product/service categories, information about your company, contact details, and any relevant guarantees. This menu also needs to be readily accessible, so don’t position it awkwardly.
There are aspects of your site with which you can (and should) get creative, but this isn’t one of them. Consider what your target visitor will want and expect, then deliver an experience that neatly meets their needs with no unnecessary complications.
Don’t go crazy with color and fonts
Color changes can make pages feel more vibrant, but vibrancy falls below consistency in the web design pecking order. The best designs are aesthetically pleasing, yes, but simple, allowing users to understand what’s going on. A drab but functional page may still return value, but one that looks dazzling but happens to be near-incomprehensible never will.
To make things optimally easy to read, limit yourself to two or three font types, and avoid overusing italics or different levels of boldness. Trying to read a page littered with different fonts can be a deeply-unpleasant experience. And instead of mixing colors up on a whim, start with a straightforward color palette that reflects your brand (Canva has a good guide to this), then pick the colors or shades based on how they fit the context.
Remember that contrast is key. Don’t put white text over a light background, for instance. It’ll be tough enough for most people to make out, and all but impossible to read for those with visual impairments. Accessibility is very important. Your website should be for everyone.
Avoid stock images where possible
Something else you need to carefully consider is how you use imagery on your website. According to research, 75% of consumers judge businesses’ credibility based on their website designs, and reliance upon stock imagery can make yours look unprofessional. Investing in real photography might seem intimidating, but it’s a worthwhile move. We recommend hiring a photographer and video crew to get the best images. At Stokhaus Media, we offer everything under one umbrella.
How you use imagery (and what exactly you put your money towards) should follow naturally from your industry. If you run a marketing agency, for example, creating a team page with employee headshots will increase confidence in your business and make it easier for prospective clients to empathize with you.
If you run an ecommerce store, however, potential customers won’t be interested in your team members. Instead, they’ll want high-quality images of your products: going the extra mile for generic items by covering different angles will give you an edge over competitors that rely on the same mediocre photos (or even throw in unrepresentative stock images).
These 5 top design tips can help you create a great website or overhaul one that’s falling short. With some time and effort, you can build a site that makes your brand look great. Why not get started right away?