10 Essential Web Design Tips From a Digital Marketing Firm

Ask yourself the following questions. Can your visitors understand what your company does within 5 seconds of arriving on your website? Can they also easily navigate your blog? Is your pricing page layout intuitive and easy to figure out? And finally, does your website have a low bounce rate?

If you answered no to these questions, then you may want to rethink how you’ve designed and optimized your website. Here are 10 essential web design tips from a digital marketing firm that can help you do a better redesign of your website.

1.) Your Buyer’s Journey

After acknowledging that your website needs a redesign, you’ll need a plan to tackle it. Begin by laying out your customer’s journey from beginning to end. The beginning is when they land on your website for the first time, and the end is when they become a customer.

Also, consider what will happen in the middle of their journey. What pages will they view? What content will they read? And what offers will convert them into customers? Knowing these things will allow you to design a website that nurtures leads through your sales funnel.

It’s recommended to use a CRM to make researching this information easier. However, if you’re finding it difficult to obtain this data, you can always just ask (interview) your customers. Just ask them if they can give you 15-30 minutes of their time to answer a few of your questions (you can even provide incentives if you’d like).

2.) Touchpoints

You can then use this information to formulate your strategy. This strategy will include the key touchpoints of your site. Touchpoints are the areas of your site that users interact with most.

And with each of these touchpoints, you should be able to determine what opportunities, emotions, pain points, thoughts, and goals each touchpoint needs to evoke.

When you know what needs to happen with your touchpoints, you can enable it with your web design. Perhaps you need certain imagery or color palettes. A digital marketing firm can help with creating the right design elements for these key parts of your website.

3.) Remove Distracting Elements

Certain parts of your site can detract from your value proposition. For example, complex animations, poor-quality website images, and lengthy or poorly formatted content are all common examples.

Since most people have a maximum attention span of 8 seconds, you’ll need to make it very clear what information they will learn on your page. There should also not be any distracting web design elements that detract from this.

4.) Website Loading Speed

As part of a good website design, your website should serve data to visitors quickly. After all, no one will hang around if all the images on your site take ages to load.

So what’s a good way to limit the loading time to something acceptable? Picking the right web host for your site can make a huge difference. It can also be a good idea to use a website builder that prioritizes loading speed.

Finally, try to reduce the number of bigger items in your site design. The more high-resolution images or videos on display, the longer it can take for people to download all that data.

5.) Make Mobile a Priority

This is perhaps the most important web design tip out there. A web page that’s both responsive and mobile-ready is required in today’s world. Currently, more than 50% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. So, you’ll want to make sure that each aspect of your website will work properly in different resolutions. You should also pick a platform that will optimize your images for mobile devices.

There’s more to mobile optimization than this, and there are plenty of ways to include mobile optimization on your website. A digital marketing firm will be familiar with these methods.

 

6.) Create a Visual Hierarchy

Where you place different things on your website is very important. After all, humans are visual creatures, and providing information in a way that’s easy to consume is vital in grabbing their attention and helping them to retain that information later on.

7.) Make the Fold Count

The fold is the first part of a website that’s viewable before being required to scroll. This part of your website design deserves extra attention due to its great importance.

Ensure that your most important elements, like your call to actions (CTAs) and headline, are located in this section. The fold is the first area on your site that you’ll be able to generate clicks, so you’ll want to take full advantage of it.

However, thorough web design must still include more CTAs in other parts of your web page. After all, not every visitor will be sold by the first call to action they see. The goal is to convince them to make a decision, and this decision is frequently made outside the fold.

8.) The Taller, the Better

If your content is information-dense, you’ll need plenty of space to fit it into your website design. A tall scrolling page can be perfect for this. Studies have shown that conversion rates go up as much as 30% when there is more data to scroll through.

9.) Simplify

Even if you have a lot of content to offer your visitors, you must be careful not to give them too much. A key part of website design is knowing what should be displayed to users. Remember, less is more, and present them with one detail at a time. For example, don’t sell a book series. Sell a book. Give each book individual attention, and allow the visitors to explore everything on their own. They’ll become more engaged when they have to find out certain things on their own. More engagement means they’ll be more likely to make a decision.

10.) White Space Is Good

People don’t like clutter. This translates into web design too. Keep your paragraphs padded out with plenty of white space. It will give your content more breathing room and also make it easier to read. It’s a simple and easy web design tip for driving more traffic to your website. 

Salt Rank is a digital marketing firm in Kansas City. For more help with website design, contact us today!