If you run any kind of business, you have a website. Making it work for you and not against you can take some time and effort. Effective website design can do a lot to help you grow your brand, increase the number of people who buy from you and improve your bottom line. Here are some tips to help you get the most from your website design:
- Make sure it looks great on mobile devices. More people access the internet today from a mobile device, such as a smartphone or a tablet, than they do from a computer. If your website design was not created with that in mind, you may as well not bother. This is especially true if you have brick or mortar business such as a retail store or restaurant. When people are out and about and looking for a place to eat, they do not pull out a laptop, they pull out their phone. It has been reported that a full 62% of businesses that optimize their website design for mobile devices see more sales.
- Make sure your website is optimized to load quickly. People are not very patient. You have mere seconds for your page to load before a visitor gives up and goes someplace else. Any expert in online marketing will tell you that people give websites no more than three seconds to load. You lose at least 40% of your visitors if yours takes longer. When a page takes four seconds or longer, the bounce rate for that site skyrockets to 100%. Go to eight seconds and it jumps even further to 150%.
- Keep it simple and clean. There is a lot of value-added to having a decent amount of “white space” incorporated into your website design. It makes it easier for your visitors to really see what you want them to focus on. Even if your business is one that relies on nostalgia from the 1990s when you add too much text and images to your site, it looks unprofessional and dated. Those are two looks you do not want to be associated with your brand.
- Make your content great. When it comes to great website design, people often overlook the importance of great content that is put together well. First of all, if you have content that is useful, helpful, and interesting, people will see your site as a “go to” for certain things that they need. Secondly, you need it to be written well. With the rise of social media, many people are sometimes used to seeing apostrophes where they are not needed or to see the wrong version of a word used. None of your content should have these kinds of typographical or grammatical errors. It has been found that more than half of the people who visit your page will judge your business’s professionalism by that of your website so make sure the content does not hurt your company branding efforts.
- Know that your website is never going to be finished. A website is not like a piece of property you buy and then just own. A website is a dynamic way to promote your business and brand and to interact with your clients and customers. You will never really be done with your website. You always will need to tweak it, update it, and, from time to time, do a complete rehaul. That is all normal and to be expected. Going in knowing that will make making those changes easier to deal with.
- Use all your social media sites to promote each other. You need to make sure all of the messages you put on social media, your website, your print ads, your press releases, your billboards, and anything else you use to get the word out about your brand uses the same messaging. You cannot have a different message for Facebook than you have on your website. If you do, you will be working against yourself.
When people are looking for a product or service, the first thing most do is conduct an internet search. Your webpage is the face of your business and your website design needs to be really great.