The Blog of Essential Tips for Improving Web Design

Let’s paint a picture here of your visitors landing on your website. It’s not far-fetched to claim that in a matter of seconds, your site visitors are capable of determining about your company, what it does, and whether they would be sticking around long enough to find out more. And if they don’t, then you can certainly use some tips in improving your web design.

In determining excellent user experience for your visitors, you must ask yourself and your team a couple of questions. Will your visitors be able to navigate to your blog easily? Is your pricing understandable? And when you check your analytics, are your bounce rates through the roof?

These are just one of the few reasons why you should be working on optimizing your website to perform the best way possible, wherein you can able to meet your goals and cater to your audience’s needs.

Essential Tips for Improving Web Design

The website cannot succeed solely by being able to excel in a very limited aspect (like content and design alone). Its design must meet the website’s UX functionality, and it should appropriately compliment your content.

Furthermore, you also need to be able to communicate to your audience your message or what you wanted to be.

So without further ado, here are some important tips for your website design improvement

#1 Beginning with a Plan

It’s tempting to get straight to it right off of the bag. But experts will tell you to avoid designing right away — throwing all manner of attractive interface elements and micro-interactions.

If you want to check if your website’s effectiveness in meeting your visitor’s needs, you must uncover your buyers’ journey.

Try to find out the answers to questions like the pages they are viewing, what types of content they are will be reading, the kinds of offers they would convert on. In understanding this, you can work out on the design of your site that can help your sale’s funnel development.

This simply leads to answering your customer needs or perhaps go so far as to conduct your customer research and find out how the became your customer.  Afterward, you can utilize the data to craft your own strategy.

#2 Doing Some Site Auditing

Auditing tells you which areas would need further improvement, and which ones just need a bit of tweaks here and there. And in doing some site auditing combined with fresh audience research, you’ll discover that there are actually a number of things that needs to remove in your website

There will always be peculiar elements in your website that will take the attention away from the message and the value that you’re trying to communicate to your target audience. And what do you do with these elements that distract people from the true value? You must remove them.

They can be great, but sometimes having content that’s just too long, too many complex animations, and every image lifted off of a free stock image website will seem counterproductive to what you’re trying to achieve.

Your current audiences have short attention spans — 8 seconds on average. What you must to do is create a lasting impression which quickly delivers the main idea right across. And this kind of thinking isn’t just limited to the graphics on your site alone. You can combine the visuals with short yet punchy areas of your content that are segregated and highlighted by equally compelling headlines.

Now, make sure you have checked and see if there are no irrelevant terms or that would only confuse and not provide insight. It drowns your original content in a muddle and can even become the reason why they decide to click away.

Sure, you might think they make you look smart just by adding jargons but rest assured that it doesn’t lead to making your content be appealing.

Remember, people aren’t coming to your sight to hear you ramble about technical jargon they wouldn’t even have a clue about, to begin with. In the first place, they came to your site hoping to be informed about certain points and acquire services from you that would let them meet that need.

#3 Creating punchy CTAs

Think about your visitors. When they stumble across your site, would you know how your customers will navigate within your site, would know if where they will go next?

Of course not!

Upon landing on a different website, even you can admit that you don’t know which pages you should visit first, or what you should do upon arrival. The only way you manage to do it is because websites have made it a point to take the importance of navigability in mind.

There are many things about navigability to discuss. But for this particular section, we’ll just talk about the importance of CTA buttons. They are among the most important elements that actually point to the next direction, and guides users upon arriving in the website. Every marketer is aware of CTA importance, right? But for some reason, the best of us can still fail at using these CTAs in the site to fully achieve their purpose.

Want to know whether or not you’re making these mistakes?

What you must need to do is conduct a CTA audit. Basically, check every CTA you have within your website, and read each one — not as the writer of that CTA, but as the customer buying or looking to avail of a service. Or better yet, test out your CTA on real people (from coworkers to actual people outside your company).

And should you find mistakes like the ones we’ve previously mentioned, then now you have your sure sign that you must update.

#4 Include Social Sharing Buttons

Remember when people said that awesome content is useless when nobody’s reading it?

And they’re right…

If you’re not giving every piece of your content the opportunity for exposure as it deserves, and if you won’t let your site visitors share your wondrous content, then you are missing out largely on social media engagement and reach.

This is where social sharing buttons come into play. They are small buttons placed along the top or the bottom of some blog posts. Some can be found in the left; others on the right. These social sharing buttons depict icons of various social media sites. What they do is let your site visitors share one particular piece of content directly on to a social media channel.

Social media sharing buttons are great because they’re actually not demanding. They’re easy-going tools that subtly encourage social media engagement from both new visitors and returning customers.

#5 Using Customized and Appropriate Images

The appeal of visual content among your audiences is massive. And according to science, human beings process visual stuff 6x faster. It’s no surprise that the weight on producing relevant visual content is heavy. It’s far more attractive than just pure textual content.

This brings us to discuss the importance of using the right images — even customized ones for your website. That’s because not all images can fit with every message you wanted to show to your audience.

There are plenty of royalty-free photos you can use online. And while they come in handy, it’s not appropriate to cram your site full of them. You don’t want to plague your site with those stock images.

Don’t rely purely on images lifted off of the stock website. Just because they’re high quality and appealing, doesn’t immediately make your website looks more trustworthy. Ideally, you just need to make use of photos that depict images of real people, or even pictures of the people who work behind your business. It one way of adding a personal touch.

#6 Ease of Navigation is Important

Think about it this way. If your users can’t see what they are finding, then there is no valid reason that they are going to stay within your website. If it were you, would you have stayed in a web page that doesn’t give you what you want?

Instead, these prospective customers will lead to increase your bounce rate and will just find their needs from your competitors.

While you’re working, designing, and developing your website, make sure to pay attention navigability. It’s your key to laying down the path of success. They should clearly display core places that your visitors would be able to visit freely.

Disorganized websites cluttered and bombarded with all manner of useless elements can host navigation that is confusing. So as you work to improve this aspect of your website, make sure it fulfills its purpose to show visitors what they’re looking for.

#7 Embrace the White Space

How do you feel about a website that occupies the entire screen with text and other forms of web clutter? From top to bottom, side to side, and everything in between. It’s kind of messy and gives you a strong urge to click away, doesn’t it?

One important element of web design is the concept of whitespace. It increases a page’s readability and provides clear breaks in between elements in the page; creating distinction and even highlights important elements quite well. Furthermore, it pertains to areas around page elements that don’t have any form of content — visual or otherwise.

To some, it may seem obnoxious. But it actually plays a part in enhancing the visual experience. It prioritizes certain forms of content and improves readability.

#8 Prioritize Optimizing for Mobile

Do you see people walking around the streets tinkering with their desktop computers or laptops? No, you don’t. People are on their phones. And with Google’s mobile-first indexing, your site has every reason to be responsive on mobile.

Otherwise, you lose traffic…

Don’t shrug off the importance of optimizing your website for mobile users. Here’s a fact for you: 80% of every person who uses the internet worldwide has a smartphone. Then Google comes out saying that about 61% of these users will not go back to a site that has access issues before and 40% of them will travel to the competitor’s website instead.

The stats show a 60-40 rate. Isn’t that concerning if you’re losing 40% of visitors?

It all boils down to one fact.

Your site needs to answer the needs of all of your target customers. And as you develop a mobile-friendly website, think about why people are trying to access your website in the first place. What do you think are they looking for?

So, learn how to create a seamless mobile experience for your users.

#9 Find and Identify Broken Links and 404 Pages

The links on your website matter. Plus, they contribute to your users’ experience too by providing easy navigation that helps lead people from one page to another.

The number of broken links in your website, additionally the 404 pages that aren’t being redirected depends largely on how old your website is, and how big of a space it’s occupying. It’s all fine and dandy if your site visitors would point out that they keep running into broken links and 404s.

But the thing is that they won’t. They will click away, and find another site that won’t be as regular with the broken links and the 404 pages. For this reason, finding these irregularities within the website is your sole responsibility.

Dedicate a good amount of time to do a thorough check of how your website is doing. Find the broken links and replace them with more updated ones. Setup redirects for the ones that lead to 404 pages.

#10 Keep Your Content Updated

Who are you writing your copy for? Yes, it’s meant to get you some customers. But you can’t attract your customers if your copy is dead and does not actually give them what they want. Let’s get one thing straight. They didn’t come to your site for entertainment. They came because they needed something.

As you’ve probably noticed, many write copies that have the intention of impressing visitors. But the sad part is, most of us fall down a trap hole that consists of language that’s not magnetic for your target audiences.

What am I talking about? I’m saying that most web copy is more focused on the ‘we’ and the ‘our’ rather than the ‘you‘ — which your audiences would be more attracted to.

It’s easy to assume that what you’re actually trying to do is painting your business in bright light, so your audiences will get to know you like this company who values all these ethical and moral standards, but this type of talk won’t actually carry your point across. For a lot of your target audiences, it’s like listening to that one friend who loves to talk about himself.

Use ‘you’ language instead of ‘we’ for a far better appeal. Your prospective clients and future customers need you to see their needs and them eye-to-eye. You have to understand the pain points they have, and directly elaborate on how you can solve those problems.

This shift in the grammatical pattern actually influences your customer’s thoughts on your business. Because at the end of the day, they’re thinking: ‘What’s in it for me?’

#11 Offer Something that’s Unique or New

Measuring generated conversions are a good method of finding out how many users are coming through your marketing funnel. Of course, most of us marketers know that you can produce conversions by providing resources that site visitors would find useful — from offers to detailed product demonstrations to stuff like whitepapers or ebooks.

But then again, there are so many varying types of documents scattered all over the internet. And because of that, it’s become even more difficult to set yourself apart from the others and come through the other content noises — all while trying to attract more people and persuading people to convert.

So in whatever you plan to do in the future, just ensure that in everything you end up putting out there is a step higher than that of your competitors’.

#12 Be Constant with A/B Testing

The importance of testing isn’t lost in this day and age.

Tracking the path of conversion, how far your users go on for scrolling in your website, and where their clicks land, etc are essential qualities that show if your web pages perform excellently as you intend them to.

If you have more pages to sift through, the chances of you coming across issues on the vast majority of these pages are slightly high — more for landing pages that are older. These pages may be performing well but may include outdated pieces of information that you’d do well to update.

On the one hand, some just might need slight tweaks, design changes, or updates. Even something as seemingly simple as changes in header images, colors in buttons, or a few more sentences in the copy make significant differences in how your webpage performs.

And for each change you make, create another variant. It’s ideal to conduct some A/B testing to figure out what your users are up to. And the results you manage to gather after every test will uncover pretty great insights and open doors to a rich variety of real-time data for actual use in the future.