Within seconds of landing on your website, are your visitors able to determine the nature of your business? Are visitors able to easily navigate throughout the website and find what they are looking for?
If you find yourself answering “no” to these questions, it might be the right time for you to think about the way you’ve designed your website.
A website cannot be judged solely on the basis of its content or layout. For a website to be successful, each of its aspects has to feed into the overall user experience. The design must complement the content, thereby optimizing your website to the fullest.
Below are a few tips that could help you design a better website
- Plan website offline on a paper - Instead of jumping right in and figuring things out as you go, why not turn to the trusty pencil and paper or use a whiteboard to plan an overall site layout off-screen first. Use this approach to get an idea of where you want specific elements to go, much like how an architect uses floor plans to plot out where windows, doors, and rooms should go. Don’t just start designing your website. To ensure that your website is effectively meeting the needs of your visitors you need to map out your buyer’s journey from the first time they visit your website to the moment they become a customer. What pages are they going to view, what content are they going to read, and what offers are they going to convert on?
Source : Google
- Keep it clean and clutter-free - The world around us has become quite cluttered and the web is no exception. Ads, banners, icons, badges, signs, pop-ups, buttons, and so on – sometimes it can all get a bit heavy. Too much clutter can distract readers and make a site appear overly complicated. So why not give your site visitors a break from all the noise and clutter? Embracing things like flat design and white space can do wonders for your site visitor’s experience. Try to keep everything simplistic or even minimal with only your most important content spotlighted. Sometimes less really is more.
Source : Google
- Site’s navigation - When designing your website, navigation is key, it’s essentially the map that displays the core places users can visit. There’s nothing worse than a site with a disorganized or confusing navigation interface. When improving your website’s navigation, it’s important to ensure that your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for. Some characteristics of a lean navigation bar include streamlined content, navigation hierarchy, and responsive design, so the experience doesn’t drastically change on mobile. If users cannot find what they’re looking for, they have no reason to stay on your site. Instead, they will certainly bounce and find a competitor that offers a better user experience.
Source : Google
- Appealing multimedia - Not every image is going to fit with the type of message you’re trying to show your audience. Just because a stock website has the image, doesn’t mean it looks genuine and will evoke trust in your company. Ideally, you want to use photos that portray images of the real people that work at your company and the office itself. If real photographs aren’t an option, there are techniques you can use to help pick out the right type of stock photo. This will aid in bringing more realism to your brand and making sure the images match who you are and what your content is explaining.
Source : Google - Check links – Depending on the size of your website, or how long it’s been around, you may actually have a few pages or links here and there that aren’t working. Take the time to evaluate whether or not your site has broken pages. You may be surprised to find previously high-performing landing pages that are unpublished or website pages that are improperly linked.
Source : Google - Include Social Share and Follow Buttons - Producing great content and offers only go so far if you aren’t giving your users the opportunity to share what you have. If your website currently lacks social share buttons, you could be missing out on a lot of social media traffic that’s generated from people already reading your blog. If this sounds new to you, social sharing buttons are the small buttons that are around the top or bottom of blog posts. They contain icons of different social media website and allow you to share the page directly on the social media channel of your choice.
Source : Google - Call to action - Once your visitors land on your site, do they know what to do next? They won’t know what pages to view or actions to take if you don’t provide them with some sort of direction. Call-to-action buttons are one of the many elements that indicate the next step user should take on a page. While many of us know that, it can be easy to fail to accurately use them to guide users through your website. Take the time to add in call-to-actions that give them materials to educate themselves and help solve their pain points. Once they identify your company as one that provides materials that are relieving these, they will feel more comfortable researching your services to see if you can personally make these solutions a reality.
Source : Google