In order to compete effectively in the online marketplace, it is becoming crucial for firms to make use of responsive and aesthetically appealing design of their business website. Doing so is crucial for creating a good first impression on visitors and attracting customers to create sufficient sales and profits for the business. This is particularly important for startup companies that are not as established in the industry and wish to ensure their branding efforts materialize into a strong customer response and demand.

However, most companies fail to have a good website design compromising their marketing efforts. Customers are often put off by poor use of imagery and flow of text that causes them to switch to rival products and services instead. Being aware of these mistakes can be important for avoiding any blunders that can lose potential customers.

For this reason, the ease at which an online business can lose customers due to poor website design can be significantly high. To prevent this from happening, it is important for a business website to utilize the latest design trends and integrate tools and technologies that can augment repeat buying.

In this post, we present a detailed guide on a few important pointers to ensuring a stylish and appealing web design.

Top Features Your Website Should Have

Essential business information

First, it is critical that the information provided on your website be relevant to your business. Depending on the type of your business, the information presented can make or break your business. For instance, if you are a B2B service provider, you need to mention what services you provide and where you are based.

Always remember that visitors more or less tend to have a short attention span and when they browse websites, they are looking all essential information as quickly as possible. This also means that in addition to providing information that is relevant to your business, you should also ensure it is concise and straight to the point.  Use a font large enough to read easily and make sure that the most valuable information draws the visitors attention.

You need to bear in mind that the visitor wants to understand what you are as a business in a few words and phrases. If you provide services within a confined geographical location, you need to mention what cities or areas within a city you operate in.

Furthermore, your website needs to provide your contact information, including your phone and email address details. Many businesses fail to provide their contact details that only result in lost customers. Many visitors would spend minutes searching for a business’ email address and phone numbers after becoming interested in a product or service, but be unable to contact the business.

These are simply lost opportunities for gaining more customers that could otherwise have been avoided by providing contact detail in good view. Speaking of contact information, make sure that your email address has your corporate name domain. Providing a Gmail or Hotmail corporate email address will only make you appear unprofessional and clumsy.

While this may not directly affect the aesthetics of your web design, it can certainly have a large impact in the way you are perceived by visitors.

Clear navigation

Another important aspect of good web design is making use of good navigation. Your website should provide a clear and organized way of navigating through different webpages using a logical layout of menus and sub-menus. Making use of this can be important for directing visitors to information that can be of interest to them such as products and services, payment options, and contact information that can help increase conversion rates and build customer base.

Of course, your choice of menus and sub-menus will depend on the type of industry you operate in and what products and services you provide. However, the most important thing is to direct them using an organized set of menus to eventually become your customer.

Effective website navigation can be thought similarly to a retail store outlet. As a retail store manager, you need to decide what products and items are placed at the entrance and how the layout should cascade into different areas and sections along with customer tills. The purpose of organizing your retail store environment is to help navigate visitors to obtain information related to your products and services and other aspects to eventually reach the customer till to make purchases.

Responsive design

The growth in users browsing the internet from their smartphones and tablet PC is giving rise to the importance of effective responsive design. The ease at which users should be able to view a website from different devices is requiring websites to be fluid in its response times to provide a smooth and seamless user experience.

Websites that are not optimized for mobile devices, for instance, are expected to lose a significant number of visitors who surf the internet from such devices. This is crucial considering how a substantial amount of web traffic is now being generated from smartphones and tablet PCs. It is no surprise why many businesses are now making sure their websites can adapt to portrait and landscape views in mobile devices and offer concise information, such as their business name and logo and contact information.

Responsive design is thus a crucial aspect of efficient web design. Businesses need to approach their web design from the standpoint of a mobile phone user and see which functionalities and features should be integrated to offer an enriching experience.

Structured layout of text and images

Having a structured and organized layout of images and text is essential for keeping your business website neat and tidy. Many websites suffer from having text and images all over the place that only gives a bad impression on visitors. All text needs to be organized into short paragraphs through a minimalist design to ensure there is sufficient white space. This is being used by various companies to provide a clean and polished look to their online store.

The mistake many companies make is that they provide a large sea of text that not only gives an untidy look to their website, but also makes unattractive for visitors to continue browsing the website. This can affect the ease at which visitors can find relevant information whilst skimming through text.

Therefore, always make sure your flow of text and images is structured and organized to provide easy web navigation.

Engaging content

Content marketing is considered to be one of the most cost-effective and efficient marketing methods used by companies. The integration of infographics, videos, images, text, and sounds is becoming more and more important in capturing the attention of customers in an already noisy and saturated online marketplace. How you utilize different forms of content for engaging customers can be critical towards the success of your marketing campaigns and ensuring there are enough repeat customers to grow and expand your market share.

Productive web design therefore requires companies to use high resolution imagery and video content to make their brand appear more personalized and human-like. Until a few years ago, businesses mostly tailored their web design efforts through text. However, people are not as engaged by long paragraphs of text as they do by large and attractive images and flashy video content.

However, you also need to be careful that adding such content does not affect website loading speed and performance. Adding too many high resolution imagery and flash videos can take longer for the webpage to load. If a webpage is not able to load within a few seconds, visitors will more than likely to exit the website and switch to rivals. Therefore, use engaging content whilst making sure it does not affect website loading speed.

Security certificates

If you have an ecommerce store for the purpose of selling goods and services online, you need to ensure your website has the required SSL certificates. These are crucial for encrypting sensitive and confidential customer data to ensure safe and secure payment transactions. A website that has SSL certificates will have a symbol or logo saying it is secured by a credible SSL certificate, such as VeriSign or GeoTrust. In either case, all customer transactions are kept secure from the reach of hackers and cyber-criminals who seek to exploit such data for financial fraud.

Failing to equip your website with SSL certificates will leave your website vulnerable to risks of financial fraud. Should sensitive customer data be leaked, it can compromise your credibility and cause you to lose customers and incur heavy financial losses.

SEO-optimized

If your website is not SEO-optimized, it will fail to reach your target customers and prevent you from building a customer base large enough to make sufficient sales revenue. This is why it is crucial to ensure you are using the relevant keywords pertaining to your target audience or sales of products and services in boosting search engine ranking and results to gain greater traction. You need to ensure you are using both short-tail and long-tail keywords along with the proper use of meta titles, meta-tags, and meta descriptions for each of your webpages.

Using short-tail and long-tail keywords will be important for attracting both general and specific customer groups. Say you provide IT services to small enterprises. An example of short-tail keywords can be ‘business intelligence solutions’. However, when using long-tail keywords, this could be ‘IT service solutions in New York’. Remember that long-tail keywords are more specific than short-tail keywords. However, to bolster your SEO efforts, you will need to incorporate both to achieve the best results.

Another means of ensuring your website is SEO friendly is using backlinks. These are basically hyperlinks to other pages that help in establishing credibility of your content that helps increase your SEO search engine rankings. While the thought of adding links to other websites may seem counterintuitive, it can be a good way of building integrity of your content. This can include using links to credible research studies and papers to increase reliability and trustworthiness.

Efficient Web Hosting

Website performance is part and parcel of good web design and this requires making efficient use of good web hosting options. Of course, there will be many web hosting providers who will claim to provide 24/7 technical assistance and up-time guarantee. But, choosing one that has experience in offering web hosting plans to businesses similar to yours will be a good means of making sure you benefit from the right resources.

If you are an eCommerce retailer, decide how much data does your web hosting provider offer. This can be crucial for ensuring your website does not suffer from too much downtime. Furthermore, ask how quickly the technical department can provide solutions should your website crash. If they are located too far from your premises, it can take longer for them to resolve downtime problems.

Use a Personalized Logo and Color Theme

Every successful business is recognized by a logo, and if you wish to build your brand presence and dominate your competitors, it is vital that you invest in a logo that works for your business. It is not necessary that your logo looks polished and sleek; this will depend on what products and services you offer and what industry you operate in. Usually, logos of tech companies tend to be more polished. However, companies that specialize in offering baby products may use simple colors and text fonts to signify tenderness and youthfulness.

This requires understanding what your business stands for, its vision, and its long-term goals. You will then need to select the right color theme to go with your logo. If it is too dark, it might give off a gloomy feel. However, if you choose bold colors, it can reflect passion, energy, and exuberance.

In fact, the use of bold colors can have a strong impact on brand recall on website visitors, which can lead to greater likelihood of conversions and repeat buying. It is important that your website logo and theme consists of strong and bold colors to instantly grab the attention of visitors.

Contact Cyber Corp Software to find out how we can help turn your website into a masterpiece.