How The Design Of Your Website Can Impact Your Business
The main goal of your website is to grow your business and boost your sales. Therefore, it is essential that it is impeccably designed, as it is supposed to represent your products and services in the best possible way. A dynamic and aesthetically pleasing website is your path to gaining new customers, keeping them around, as well as bringing back the old ones.
If your page is outdated, dull, takes forever to load, and lacks the information that is valuable to your customers, your website visitors will turn away, and look for similar products and services elsewhere.
Here is how the design of your website can have an impact on your business.
The design elements
It is quite often the case that the design elements of your website are more important for the first impression than your content. It is essential that your website is easy to understand and to navigate.
Simple and quick navigation is vital as it enables your website visitors to easily get to where they want to be, and therefore trust your website to provide them with the necessary information. This especially goes for large websites with a lot of pages and content.
Your navigation needs to provide breadcrumbs so that people can always know where they are on your website. It should also be creative, including animated buttons and innovative shapes. If your website’s design is too dull, full of irritating pop-ups, and loads way to slow, it is bound to have a contra effect on people, and they will surely leave, no matter what the quality of your product is.
Content and branding
The design elements are the first thing that draws the attention of your customers, but they are worthless if they don’t lead to amazing content that is properly formatted. You need to provide clear information that is relevant and valuable to your visitors, in order to gain their trust.
The first step is to create a proper homepage with just enough content to entice visitors to dive in deeper, as they don’t spend much time here and this is where they decide whether to stay or leave.
Your subpages are where you offer people more information on what they are looking for, educating them on how your products and services can help them.
Remember that your website is an essential asset for your branding, and that it should be consistent with offline advertising forms such as printed materials and business cards. You should make it easy for your customers to recognize your brand in all forms, and be able to make a connection between what is online and what is out there on the market.
Keeping up with the trends
The trends in website design tend to come and go, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t focus on some of the big ones. According to experts from custom web design Sydney, parallax design which comprises of a single page with all the content that you just keep scrolling through, might be a good way to keep your visitors engaged, without being forced to click through other pages.
Another huge trend to follow up on is responsive design, which enables the website to automatically adapt to the device that your visitor is using. It enables you to have one website instead of two, which might end up having different content. Every trend has its own pros and cons, which you need to take into consideration. What is most important is that your website looks professional and fresh. The professionalism of your website’s design should reflect your own products and services, because that is the association that your visitors will make.
Share buttons
You should add sharing buttons for social media pages to your website, as it enables your visitors to say what they think about your brand right away, and share their opinions and thoughts with their friends. At the same time, it makes it possible for you to track what is being told about you. You can also monitor the inbound traffic from social media links, search queries, and other advertising methods.
It is also a fact that your visitors expect to see a “share” button on your website. This makes adding them a requirement. People today like to share their online findings, and if you make it hard for them, they will be dissatisfied.
In summation
Your website is your storefront, and its success depends on impeccable design. You have to create a visually enticing website that offers usability to your visitors, and easily takes them to content that is valuable and relevant to them. Trends come and go, but you should keep up with the big ones, and make sure that your website remains modern, fresh and clean, in order to provide the proper user experience.
Author bio: Sam Cyrus is CEO and co-founder of Algorithm SEO Sydney, a Digital Marketing agency from Australia. Sam is also a creative writer and likes to share his insights on entrepreneurship, business, online marketing, SEO and social media.
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