When running an online business, the last thing you want is to lose potential clients due to an awful web design that negatively impacts user experience. Indeed, your website’s usability and aesthetics can play a massive role in the long-term success or failure of your company.
So, how do you ensure that your design helps you achieve your customer acquisition and revenue goals? This is what our post today is all about. Here, we share simple tips for improving your website’s user experience (UX) by making changes to your overall design.
Aesthetics
The web design industry has grown tremendously over the past decade, with thousands of free and paid themes and website builders now readily available for all to use. With this, there isn’t any justification for creating websites that look like they were made in the early 2000s. Remember, your choice of design has such a significant impact on the impression created in the minds of your customers about your brand.
In 2020, strive to create or redo your website to ensure it uses a newer and sleeker design that appeals to the eye. The idea is to keep it looking up to date and contemporary, which helps your business resonate better with the modern consumer. A few fresh web designs you can implement at the moment include parallax scrolling and the use of catchy and interactive multimedia elements.
Page speed
Among the many factors that Google uses to rank pages on its search results, load time is one of the most important. Essentially, this is the time it takes for a page to load fully on different devices. For the best results and to reduce the bounce rate, be sure to keep your load speed below 3 seconds.
Start by optimizing various elements of your design, including reducing the size of your images and other multimedia items. You should also minimize the amount of white space in your pages to cut on data demand.
Most importantly, consider getting a good hosting company that guarantees high uptimes and quick loading speeds. This list of affordable web hosts is an excellent place to begin your search.
Professional look
Depending on your business goals and the image you want to create for your brand, you can achieve a professional look by adding several elements such as photos and descriptions of your workforce or add a dedicated page describing your company’s values and mission. Images of you and the team help to show your visitors that you’re more than just a brand. On the other hand, having a page that explains your company culture or values will show users that your company does more than just work. Finally, if you have any tangible results or case studies of your past successes, consider showcasing them to build customer confidence and credibility.
Navigation
When visitors land on your website, they want to spend the least amount of time to find what they want there. As such, you need to make their work simpler by ensuring that your design is easy to navigate and that all the important pages and sections are easy to access from the landing pages.
There are two most popular website navigation styles that you can choose from:
Drop-down menu
This style allows visitors to find pages under specific categories by hovering their cursor over the menu titles.
Breadcrumb
If you’re using this style on your site, any time a visitor clicks a new page, the old page is automatically added to the navigation bar, which makes it easy for them to go back in an instant if they wish.
Remember, the two navigation styles can work together in harmony, so feel free to use both if you think they can be implemented on different parts of your site.
Conversions
Let’s face it, any business owner dreams and strives to convert as many users into leads and customers as possible. This is why conversion is such a big topic in the world of online business right now.
Web design impacts business conversions in numerous ways. For starters, the color scheme you decide to use for your design significantly influences your brand image and ultimately your conversions. For example, your conversions can dramatically improve once you use warmer colors like red or yellow on your buttons and other calls to action elements. Additionally, it pays to keep your designs and graphics unexaggerated and straightforward to make it easier for your web visitors to focus on what your website is about and not on other non-important elements.
How are you taking care of user experience on your website? We’d love to hear your feedback.
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