Dynamic Website design and development
With approximately two billion websites across the globe, you may want to pay attention to design elements of your site to help it stick out from the crowd. Of course, you’re not competing with all of those sites since they cover an incredible variety of interests and niche markets, but whatever industry you are in, you’ll have your share of competition to fight with for market share.
The design of your website is critical to help establish your branding. The following are a few considerations for website design and development that you should keep in mind to help create a site that accomplishes what you’re looking for.
Establish the Purpose of the Website
In order to design anything, you first need to have an end goal in mind. What are you trying to do with your website? Is it an e-commerce site that you’re using to directly sell products? Perhaps you sell a product or service that typically requires multiple contacts before getting a sale, so the purpose of the website may simply be to get leads for you to follow up with.
The purpose of your website will determine what elements you’ll want to stress and whether you’ll need certain features at all such as shopping cart integration, for example, if it is an e-commerce site. Don’t even start putting a site together until you’ve fully fleshed out what you expect it to accomplish for you.
Make Sure It’s a Mobile-Friendly Website
As of 2018, just over 52 percent of all website traffic around the world comes from mobile phone users. If your website doesn’t utilize what’s known as responsive design so that it can reshape itself to look and function just as well on the smaller screens of mobile devices, you will lose an incredible amount of leads and sales. Beyond turning off users, Google also penalizes rankings for websites that are not friendly to mobile users.
Go With a Simple Design That Enhances the User Experience
Avoid having a clutter of text and images on webpages. Adequate white space can be a useful visual design element to help focus the user’s attention where you want it to go. Also, don’t go overboard with fancy fonts and color schemes. Keep the fonts simple and readable. That calligraphy typeface that you just love will be harder for many people to read. Similarly, make sure gaudy colors don’t turn off visitors to your site.
Having a simple, elegant design with intuitive site navigation should be complemented with compressed image files, minimized website code and only having essential plugins. All of this will add up to faster loading pages, which is extremely important to your website’s success. In our instant gratification, short-attention-span world, people aren’t going to wait more than a couple of seconds for your webpages to load before they move on elsewhere, and then you’ve lost that potential sale probably forever.
Include Compelling Content and a Strong Call to Action
You can have the prettiest design for your website, but if the information on that site doesn’t answer visitors’ questions in an engaging enough manner to cause them to move to the next step in the sales process, then it’s not going to matter a whole lot. Having a pretty website with lousy content is like having a car with a shiny new paint job but no engine. Just as with the car’s engine, the content is what moves people along your site and gets them to take the action you want them to take.
Getting people to take action is where “calls to action” come into play. It’s incredible how easy it can be to do a great job talking up your products or services and then falling short when it comes to telling them to call you or to fill out the contact form for more information or to place their order in the case of an e-commerce site. Try to offer something to compel them to take this next step such as a free newsletter if they fill out the contact form or a free consultation if they call for an appointment.
Make Sure It’s an SEO-Friendly Website
The best website in the world is useless if nobody finds it. Helping people find it is where search engine optimization comes into the picture. There are so many elements to SEO that this would be a topic for a separate article (or several) unto itself.
Some of the factors for good SEO have already been mentioned. Engaging information that answers users’ questions and causes them to linger on your website longer is appreciated by search engines, which reward this with higher search rankings. Responsive design for mobile devices and fast-loading pages from a simple design are other critical factors that search engines appreciate as much as the average user.
Make Sure the Website Works
Before launching your website, check for broken internal links in its navigation and any error messages that display from pages that aren’t working. Nothing will make all of your hard work look amateurish more quickly than broken links and error messages.
Get Help if You Need It
You already have a business that you’re knowledgeable in, so maybe you don’t want to have to pick up website design and development as a second specialty. Fortunately, there are web design professionals out there that can affordably create a website for you. The pointers above are only the tip of the iceberg of what a website developer will know.
A knowledgeable web designer can incorporate a CMS into your website, such as WordPress, to make your site more user-friendly, accessible and optimized for SEO. Such a platform also has massive support for add-ons that will extend your site’s capabilities and features to fit any future need. For an extra boost in getting above your competitors, you may not want to go it alone with your website design