10 Easy Ways To Achieve The Best Web Design
The appearance of your website is very important to the overall success of your business. What people see when they click onto your page influences how they see and understand your brand. Unfortunately poorly designed websites get published everyday. If you build a ‘bad’ site you could lose thousands of dollars and be forced to start back at square one.
There are a number of aspects to consider when designing a website for your business. Read on to find out how you can create the best web design for your business.
1. Take Your Time
If you don’t have a website up yet it can feel like a race to get one up and running. This puts many businesses in the predicament of choosing fast results over good results. A few weeks, or even months of time is not going to change much, in fact if you take the time to create a website that is effective it will be worth the extra time. Your other option is to toss up a quickly composed site that doesn’t rank or function properly.
Stop worrying so much about time and deadlines, and instead work on creating a website that offers a superior user experience. A website shouldn’t just work correctly, but it should also look nice as well. If your site appears unprofessional, people are going to click away and go elsewhere. Just like a storefront, your site needs to be clean, organized, and easy to navigate, all of which takes time to properly fashion.
Take your time testing the site as well before going live. Make sure it works just as good on a Mac computer as it does an Android phone. Don’t create a website that only works for one specific screen size because you will cut out the majority of your target audience in doing so.
2. Identify & Analyze Your Target Audience
There are so many things to consider during the planning and building process of any website. Perhaps the most important question revolves around your target audience. Who are they? How old are they?
Your goal is to design a site that speaks directly to your target audience. For example, if your audience is older make sure your website includes large size font, tested and approved by the elderly of course. This sort of personalization will make the difference between a site that your target audience appreciates, and a site that they exit out of right away.
3. Avoid Flashy, Loud Features
Videos that play automatically and songs that come on without any warning are often incorporated into a website, but that doesn’t mean these flashy features are a good idea. People don’t like to be bombarded with loud noise, after all people surf the web from a number of locations and no one wants to be the person at the silent library responsible for suddenly striking up an orchestra.
Getting into your target audience’s head is key to creating the site they are ultimately looking for. When creating a website you have to think of everything, including where your customers might view your site from, and what they will want to find as soon as they get on the homepage? Finding these answers takes some research and time, but your efforts will most certainly pay off.
4. Have A Clear Call To Action
Everything about your website needs to be clear, including what you do, what you have to offer, and your call to action. What do you want someone to do after they land on your webpage? Maybe you want them to make a purchase, or subscribe to your newsletter; whatever your goal is becomes your call to action. Customers need to see this call to action and it needs to be effective, otherwise they will just leave your page without following through with anything.
5. Pick A Clear Target Audience
Businesses often think they are open for everyone, but really every business has a specific target audience. You can’t create content that pleases everyone, it’s impossible, but you can please a much larger percentage of one specific target audience.
Trying to please the masses is only going to get you in over your head, unable to please anyone. Instead, find the audience that is most likely to dig what you are offering and focus your research, design and content efforts around this group of people.
6. Create A Website That Is Easy To Use
One big reason that Apple products have taken the world by storm is that they are easy to use. You don’t have to be a genius to pick up an iPhone and do what you need to do. This same purpose of simplicity must apply to your website if you want people to actually use it. Easy to absorb text, accessible sharing buttons, and familiar navigation are important components of a website that is easy to use.
Make sure that everyone, young and old, can navigate your site. Test it out before ever putting the site live, making sure a wide variety of people with different levels of computer knowledge can access what they are looking for without much trouble. If a site is not easy to use people will just click out and go elsewhere.
7. Have A Method to Track Conversion Rates & More Before Going Live
The best way to continually improve your website is to know what people are clicking, how long they are staying on a particular page, and where they are coming from. These numbers can be tracked, giving you the information you need to make proper changes and improve results. By tracking conversions you have an easy way to know exactly how well your efforts are paying off, and which efforts are paying off the best.
8. Have A Good Logo And Stick With It
Your logo says a lot about who you are, or at least it should. Your logo is how people will identify your business and recognize you in the future. It takes seeing the same logo a number of times before people actually trust it and familiarize with it.
If your logo design is unprofessional, or inconsistently used, it’s harder (if not impossible) for people to identify with your brand and ultimately trust it. Before putting your website up live for the world to see, make sure your logo design has been worked on just as much as the overall layout of your website.
If your logo is made from a simple clip-art template no one is going to trust your brand. You need to show something unique and authentic, something people will notice and remember in the future.
9. Create A Good Mix Of Content And Graphic Displays
Your website should not be a running stream of endless content, nor should it only include pictures. You need a good mix of content and media in order to attract and keep attention. People that visit your site will likely only read about 28% of your content, but that doesn’t mean content is unimportant.
It just means you have to get creative and find ways to incorporate content with digital graphics, images, bullet points, and bold headers so that it is easy for people to still understand what is going on without reading every last word.
http://blog.crowdspring.com/2014/03/small-business-marketing-web-design/
The world is currently hooked on DIY for just about everything, but when it comes to creating an effective website DIY is not the greatest way to earn success. Do you have experience with Internet marketing? How much do you really know about SEO, and not just from reading a few blogs online, but also from real firsthand experience? What about social media marketing, do you have experience with this?
These are all important questions to consider before taking on your own marketing.
If you have little to no experience with online marketing and website creation, it might be best to hire someone to help, at least in the beginning stages.