Web design serves a website the way roots serve a plant. Plants use their roots to anchor themselves in the ground, deliver much-needed nutrients to their leaves, and achieve overall growth. Like a plant with strong roots, your website relies on good web design as a foundation to keep it alive and functioning properly.
This foundation helps establish your website on the Internet, it delivers visitors to the pages where they want to go, and ultimately it is the way your website will achieve overall success through increased sales, visibility and growth.
Simply said – if you want to attract more customers to your website, you’ll need solid web design to do so.
Keep reading to learn more about how proper web design works.
Design Great User Experiences
If you own a website, chances are you’ve heard the terms User Experience Design (UX) and User Interface Design (UI) before. Though UX and UI are not the same thing, they are similar in nature. More importantly, they are the tools you’ll need to build a beautiful, high functioning and easily navigable website – a site that will attract customers in your target market and keep them wanting more.
UX and UI are used together to produce a website that speaks to your target audience. UI can be thought of like graphic design, while UX has more to do with designing the optimal path(s) a user will take to navigate through your site.
UX designers spend their time focused on things like menu layouts and navigation links, button designs and locations, shopping cart usability, and other tools that website visitors need to appropriately navigate through your website. To complete the experience and encourage more conversions, UI designers make sure that users can interact properly with the site by designing it in a visually appealing way – a way in which the buttons, links, and other tools stand out and are easy to use – specifically for your target market.
Thus, incorporating UX and UI into your overall design strategy is the only way to ensure you’re building a website that will do what it’s supposed to do when it’s complete (attract your target audience and encourage them to convert).
How to Make a Stellar First Impression
Your homepage is probably the most important page on your website – even though it might not be the first page a website visitor sees when they get there. Regardless of how a visitor navigates to your site, your homepage design is usually what your overall site will be judged by. So, while every page on your website should be designed to make a good first impression, your homepage needs to be the center of your design efforts, because it’s the portal through which people are meant to enter your virtual business. It‘s the digital face of your company.
When someone visits your website and they don’t like what they see, their first move will be to leave. What’s worse, they may tell others about their bad experience with your site, damaging your reputation and lowering your chances of attracting more customers.
You’ve only got one chance to get it right, so set yourself up for success by making sure your homepage features excellent web design.
On that note, here are 5 homepage design tips to get you started.
- Tell website visitors exactly what your business does, who you are, and what they can get from your site first. Your company branding should be included in this – items like your logo and tagline should appear close by – but the single, most crucial aspect of good homepage design lies in effective communication of the goods or services you provide – otherwise, why visit your website at all?
- Speak your target market’s language. Note the difference in how Forbes and GQ Magazine speak to their website visitors with their content. While the former is mainly concerned with finance and business, the latter focuses on fashion and style, and their homepages are no different. Lesson? Don’t mix haircut talk with hedge fund managers. Make it easy for your target market to understand your content.
- Get rid of marketing fluff. No one likes spam email. If your homepage is cluttered with content, images and links that all compete for a visitor’s attention, or if you don’t clearly and prominently state what you offer, it will be like reading a spam email – and most people will not want to read it.
- Use good calls to action. Well-designed websites use calls to action in strategic places and at key times to encourage click-through and help conversion. Especially on your homepage, good calls to action will guide your website visitors along the appropriate path, whether that’s to shop around or fill out a contact form.
- Make it mobile-friendly. Give your website the best possible chance to perform well by using responsive web design – especially on your homepage. Responsive design allows your website to be viewed from any device – mobile or otherwise – and still look and function great.
We thrive on helping our clients design websites that attract more customers. Contact us to learn more.