Tips for Improving Website Design

Web design is something that almost every business owner has to embrace, only design specialists that can grasp it. To create a fantastic marketing website, you have to master its fundamentals. That way you will be able to communicate effectively with the target audience. Even if you hire a professional web designer for your marketing website, you still have to understand some information to distinguish a good web designer from a beginner one. Not only to understand what you want but also to be able to meet up with your requirements.

A marketing website has become a very important weapon in today's digital world. It serves the role of a 24/7 salesman, being the most valuable asset of your marketing strategy and the first point of contact for your potential users. As the digital trends will make you change your website design, you may lack the time or funds to spend on such a huge project. To overcome this obstacle and understand how you can improve website design, we've compiled a list of 18 straightforward tips to increase your design proficiency.

1. Make a solid optimization for mobile devices

One of the core website improvement ideas is to always make sure that your marketing website has a solid optimization for every mobile device out there. Almost 80% of all internet users own a smartphone, and out of those eighty percent, 48 will not visit a website again if they have had a bad experience. While the other 32% will simply go to a competitor’s website.

However, responsive design isn't limited to just visual responsiveness. It is critical to personalize your site according to your visitors' requirements. Think about your potential user and ask yourself: “Why does he reach my site via mobile? What is he looking at? How do I design a website layout in a correct approach to make it easy for him to execute all of the intended actions?”

As an example, think about Amazon. You know how similar the desktop and mobile websites versions are. Whenever a user goes back and forth between the two for orders, there is a parallel between the two that helps users feel at ease when using the website on any device.

Additionally, they simplified the process of ordering on their website. The button required for this is always visible on the mobile website, allowing you to place an order without having to navigate to a different page. If your website is behind the curve in terms of mobile optimization, take a look at some examples from your marketing mobile competitors to see how they've built seamless mobile experiences for their consumers.

2. Compose stunning CTAs

Your clients are already accustomed to visual signals that help your customers to identify the most important material that they are looking for. Calls to actions or CTAs that are named like that, since they have an action word that helps your targeted users to browse your website more simply and get exactly what they're looking for in the spot they expect.

When designing buttons for your website, you should consider color psychology. Lots of researchers were astounded to discover that simply changing the colors and CTAs will significantly increase your clicks to the selling area of your website. Different colors convey a variety of messages. Consider the message you want to convey to the user (trust, experience, intellect) and pick your colors carefully.

A second factor to consider is the actual text that appears on your buttons. The words should contain a verb that motivates the reader to take action. Selecting the appropriate words or psychological triggers is highly dependent on the degree of emotion behind your chosen word. Without an emotional connection, there is no action. Therefore, make your words bold, timely, and action-oriented.

3. Bring out the white space

White space is a word used in the visual arts to refer to areas of a picture that are not visually appealing. Typically, they are empty or blank spaces placed on your marketing website. While white space on its own is uninteresting, when used artistically, it can enhance and complement the primary subject, increasing legibility.

The CTA takes center stage in most of the marketing websites, but it’s not because they are offensive, but due to the abundance of negative space surrounding them. The landing page supports the user in determining the organization's mission.

White space should surround your most crucial pieces. The more white space there is surrounding an object, the more attention it attracts. Avoid dull layouts that rely on secondary visuals. When there is a lot of white space, other aesthetic aspects such as color or typography might visually compensate for the overall picture.

White space should be used to surround just the highest-priority items. For instance, if your aim is conversions, use it to surround your email or selling CTA, not your brand or sales pitch. One of the other web website improvement ideas is to make your background unseen. If your background lacks white space, it will divert focus away from your primary pieces.

4. Keep your website pages consistent

Consistency means your marketing website matches everything in yours. Whether it is heading sizes, font selections, colors, button styles, spacing, design components, or even illustration styles. Everything should be in the same design to ensure consistency across all web pages.

To ensure that your user has a pleasant experience while navigating through your site, they must have a feeling that they are in the HQ of your company. Significant design changes across pages can cause your user to get disoriented and confused, as well as lose trust in your website.

Lots of users might even ask themselves whether they are in the correct place, after browsing just a few pages of your website. And when they do feel like that, they will usually leave for good. Inconsistencies in design will degrade the quality of the products and services you provide and offer.

Each page of your website should be structured similarly: navigation position, large headers, subheaders with specific images, and some information at the bottom. And when the users will go through such a consistent arrangement, they will be confident regardless of whatever link they click, they will be on your website, as the styling will be similar.

5. Optimize typography to improve readability

Typography comprises all visual aspects of the text, most notably fonts, but also sizes, text colors, style, and the spacing between letters, sentences, and lines. All of these factors affect the visual hierarchy and perception of your brand. Just like colors and photography, typography is available in a variety of styles. So you need to choose one that best suits your brand. Below are some of the core suggestions that you may stick to.

• Make use of web fonts - Despite the variety of fonts available, it's important to stick to proven "web-safe fonts" that can be viewed on the majority of devices and computer monitors.
• Examine the many varieties of fonts - Since, the typography is incredibly huge, familiarize yourself with the five distinct types of fonts.
• Consistently use the same typography - Balanced typography works best. Utilize distinct sets for headers, subheaders, and body, to maintain consistency across the site.

6. Make your users scroll through your homepage

Every business owner is very cautious when creating internet pages excessively long, particularly a homepage. This was done out of concern of visitors not scrolling, and it forced designers to squeeze as much information as possible into the most common screen size used to view their website.

However, those eras existed when the Internet just became a thing. Almost 74% of viewing time on a website page occurs during the first two screenfuls. As a result, there is no reason to fear developing a more robust below-the-fold experience. As a general rule, incorporate three to five sections that direct new and returning customers to the most important aspects of your site.

The list of these landing blocks may go on indefinitely, however, a short rundown of some of the more critical components includes the following suggestions:

• Each navigation item has a sufficient area to indicate the separation of landing blocks.
• Users can easily access these blocks with a single click.
• Clean and well-organized navigations communicate with the users to easily utilize their website and that there is nothing to conceal. As a result, your users are more likely to view more pages throughout their session, increasing their time on your website.

7. Use images wisely

People all around the Internet are becoming more adept at evaluating websites before deciding whether to continue browsing. When visitors first arrive on your site, they can already identify a generic stock photo they've seen elsewhere or one that reflects the impersonal aesthetic of commercial photography. Using stock photography can blast the trust factor and make your brand unoriginal. Regrettably, these relationships also apply to your business.

Thus, no stock picture will be able to express your brand, services, and goods in the manner that you desire. Only your authentic photographs or professional designers are capable of doing so while communicating properly with your potential customer. Utilize graphics or photos wisely and distribute them across your website to enhance the information you want to show to your users. Provide a visual break for viewers from the text, but make sure they are relevant and not generic.

8. Produce readable content

The term "readable" relates to the ease with which humans can recognize words, sentences, and phrases. When a marketing website is well-written, people may simply navigate through it with ease. That way, the process of acquiring knowledge becomes easier. Achieving readability on a website is relatively straightforward, but it does involve some rules, to begin with.

1. The contrast between your text and background colors is crucial for your website's readability and accessibility. While the color scheme of your website is likely to match the colors of your business, ensure that your pieces have an adequate amount of contrast.
2. The majority of people have difficulty reading smaller fonts. A general rule of thumb in web design is to keep your body text at least 16pt in size. While this is a fantastic starting point, keep in mind that this figure is completely reliant on the typefaces used on your website.
3. No more than three unique typefaces should be used on a single website. While some projects may demand more intricate font combinations, an overabundance of unique typefaces tends to appear cluttered and detract from your brand identity.
4. To establish a clear hierarchy on your website, ensure that the written content is varied in size and weight - from a large header to smaller subheadings and lastly to the tiniest paragraph or body text. This practical website design advice might assist in ensuring that visitors' attention is always pulled to something.

9. Test and analyze your website

To improve website design, yours one should be dynamic, growing as an extension of your business, not as a static document and there is always room for improvement. Enhancing specific areas of your website may enhance the overall conversions, time on page, and pages per session, the hardest part is selecting which solution is ideal for your website.

A/B testing comes into play at this point on how to improve a poorly produced website. By comparing two distinct versions of a page, you can ascertain which elements are causing your consumers problems. Your website may function beautifully in certain circumstances but include out-of-date content in others. A/B testing will reveal the amount of page content that directly influences session duration and, potentially, conversions.

In other cases, you may wish to ascertain whether design changes affect a page's performance. Simple changes to the color of buttons, headers, or phrasing can have a significant impact on conversion rates. Apart from that, and particularly if you're unclear what to do, you can use tools to generate A/B tests, multivariate tests, or even heat maps to determine how users behave.

Each test can reveal a lot of information on why visitors behave in certain ways when they engage with websites. Thus, conduct various tests and tools regularly or bi-monthly to see how the changes you've made are affecting your page's performance. Also, if you do check your marketing website frequently enough, you will detect every error sooner rather than later.

10. Provide social proof

If you're like the majority of people who buy things on various marketplaces, you're likely to gravitate toward things that have a high percentage of 5-star reviews from customers with detailed experience of a product they bought.

By reading these reviews, we acquire confidence in the product. It will deliver its promises and fulfill our needs, which encourages us to purchase it. The same effect is achieved with your product or service, as well as with your website. When customers see compelling testimonials from real individuals, research suggests that they are 58% more inclined to purchase your goods.

There are a few possible strategies to make your testimonials visually trustworthy in the eyes of your users. You must first decide on the type of testimonial you want: text or video. Video testimonials have historically been deemed to be the most effective. This is because they naturally retain the user's attention for a longer period and also facilitates the development of a stronger human connection through the ability to hear voices and see the faces of real people. However, there is another option of text testimonials, which, when developed and integrated properly, will still contribute to the development of trust with your users.

Lots of users appreciate a bunch of handful videos that feature thumbnails of people speaking, which visually reassures the viewer that they will likely hear directly from the client, rather than watching a text-based video. If you lack video testimonials, you're likely to have a case studies page where you may outline everything you did to assist your clients.

Another one of the core website design tips for small business is: if your website simply has text testimonials and not case studies, there are some considerations to make while developing them. For instance, you cannot simply include a collection of text testimonials and a name. These are less likely to be taken as true, as they leave users wondering who they work for, what their job title is, and what this individual looks like outwardly.

Secondly, the testimonies that feature images and the names of individuals/companies will enhance the legitimacy of the assessments.

When it comes to testimonials on your website, it is usually necessary to include them on your homepage, service pages, and/or a dedicated testimonial page that is linked from your navigation. Each of these pages is the optimal point of contact for visitors who are either learning about your organization or considering making a purchase. As long as the testimonials are legitimate, they will enhance the user experience on your website and help create trust with prospects before they become clients.

11. Optimize your page speed

One of the most typical website improvement ideas that are often asked is: “How to increase my website speed?”. For a web user to wait an excessive amount of time for a page to load is a huge pain. With the help of mobile devices, consumers are now able to access material from all over the world via a variety of different platforms. Whether they are currently looking at the web version of Starbucks or watching TV, they anticipate a quick response for the content they are looking for.

When they are unable to obtain it, they frequently bounce to another website that has an alternative solution. Slow page load times interrupt the user's experience. They are a direct source of annoyance, and frequently people just do not have the time to wait. An additional five seconds of page load time can increase the "bounce rate" of your website by more than 20%.

So, how do you solve this issue? Calculate your score. Google provides a free tool that allows you to obtain information about the speed of your web page. Additionally, Google will make recommendations for optimizing your load time on both Mobile and Desktop platforms accordingly.

To begin optimizing your page speed, compress all of your photos before uploading them to your website. The image file size is a significant contributor to page speed issues; using services like imagecompressor.com will help you significantly speed up each webpage you own.

12. Make your pricing block visible

Imagine you're on the lookout for a new SaaS product to help you address a problem and you've finally believed you've found one that appears to be promising. With that in mind, you're now looking for pricing information.

Thus, you click on the pricing page and are redirected to the relevant page. And instead of a transparent price list, you see that they don’t display a direct price list and they try to conceal it. As a result, you've decided to leave the site and check out the competition.

If your site follows a similar pattern, or worse, omits a pricing page entirely, your users will adopt this kind of thinking. Thus, it is very critical to have a price list on your website. You should include it because it "allows visitors to conduct their research and avoid your sales department from spending time on someone who isn't a suitable match.

You may be concerned that rivals would simply attempt to undercut you or that your pricing is too complicated to display on your website, but in truth, you should be more concerned with effectively educating your prospects on why your costing is the way it is and the value you provide.

13. Segment your data with bullet points

Bullet points are just wonderful things that help users swiftly obtain all of the information they require. Whether it is a certain benefit, solution to their problems, or even a significant characteristic of a product/service, you name it and it has all they need within a single bullet point. This small and yet critical point will improve the website design and attractiveness of your offerings while enabling your consumer to obtain all necessary information.

With an abundance of cool symbols available at a hand, you can be creative with your bullet points and assist the reader further by including graphics that illustrate your message. It compels a user to focus on the most critical points you're attempting to make without becoming bogged down in technical jargon.

14. Deal with your 404 pages

While search engines do not severely penalize you for any 404 web pages (404 stands for “page is not found”), your users will do that. When a customer approaches a specific link, image, file, or any kind of information they want to browse on your website, they are waiting for your marketing resource to take them to their desired destination.

However, seeing a 404 error page realistically drives your visitor crazy and causes them to reconsider spending time on your website. Motivating them to browse similar or alternative solutions on a competitor’s website, which will save their time. Along with that, a simple 404 web page will instantly break the user experience that your customers are going through.

Thus, one of the core web design tips for beginners would be to constantly detect any 404 pages, where they shouldn’t be. To do that on your marketing website, you can use Google Search Center tools and crawl for detecting any website errors. Additionally, you can ensure that when a user lands on a 404 page, they will automatically return to the previous page.

15. Discard “tabs” and “accordions”

Using tabs or accordion boxes to organize content can help your site feel more orderly and clean. Additionally, Google stated recently that hidden material such as this will continue to be read and indexed by the search engine. Despite these benefits, hidden information poses a significant risk: what if your visitors fail to see it?

The key to profitable web design is to make it as simple as possible for your visitors to view and understand your material. Each time they are required to click, you are likely to lose a few potential consumers.

If you have a large amount of content that is challenging to organize and navigate efficiently, try adding side navigation, as it provides consumers with a quick overview of everything on the page. Rather than concealing material behind these subheadings, each header functions as a jump link that directs the user to that area of the page.

Given the article's length of nearly 5,000 words, this arrangement saves consumers considerable scrolling. And saving consumers' time frequently equates to a greater probability of generating additional revenue from them.

16. Include visual hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is a technique used by web designers to highlight the importance of certain website blocks or information by utilizing size, color, and other criteria. It is a complicated collection of concepts that every experienced web designer relies on. If you're using a website builder you can incorporate several principles into your web design.

First and foremost, in the visual hierarchy, the larger parts are the most significant. Consider how your image and font size convey information to readers. Additionally, utilize brighter colors or accent colors to draw attention to specific visual aspects.

Secondly, almost all users naturally recognize every interrelated element nearby. Make the most of this to assist visitors in making connections regarding your products and services.

Thirdly, while it may seem beneficial to squeeze as much content as possible onto your website, doing so risks overloading your readers. Rather than that, utilize white space, or a lack of visual features, to draw attention to photos, headlines, and other material.

Finally, color enables visitors to make connections between concepts on a single web page or even an entire website. Consider utilizing specific colors to denote product categories or highlighting bargains and sales with a specific hue. Learn about color theory to assist you in selecting the most appropriate colors for your website.

17. Improve user experience with website navigation

You want your users to locate what they're looking for quickly and easily and a well-structured website aids search engines in indexing your material while significantly satisfying your users. So, here is the question: “How to improve user experience on a website with polished navigation?”. Well, in that case, here are some core suggestions to improve your website design:

This website design tip is a standard practice that your visitors will anticipate, which will save them some valuable clicks. If you do not already have one, it is strongly advised that you construct one as part of your branding activities.

Whether you choose a traditional horizontal list, a hamburger menu or something else, the menu on your website should be prominent and easy to discover. Additionally, ensure that it is arranged appropriately for the significance of each area.

Use an anchor menu if your site is long-scrolling, such as a one-page website. Viewers will be able to swiftly navigate to any component of the site with a single click. Another alternative is the 'Back to Top' button, which takes visitors to the top of the page regardless of their location on your site.

Your website's footer is likely the final thing visitors view, so it's a good idea to include all of your critical links there. This may include contact information, social network icons, a condensed version of your menu, or any other pertinent connections that visitors may require.

18. Rule your visitors with colors

Here’s another piece of advice from a pool of tips for designing a website layout, which is to wisely use colors. Each color evokes a different emotional response. If your brand identity is passionate and dynamic, a passionate red would be more appropriate than a serene blue. Apart from selecting the right colors to reflect your business, you must also utilize them effectively to establish a visual hierarchy.

First of all, try to create a color scheme hierarchy. Utilize a single color for your primary elements, secondary components, and other minor elements and keep a consistent theme. Consistently use primary, secondary, and background colors throughout your site.

While you’re at it, choose the colors that are most appealing to you personally, as they have a well-established effect on marketing. Choosing colors logically is not sufficient; they must also complement one another, so research a color theory effectively. For example, purple and red colors may both be excellent representations of your brand, the effect is lost if they are combined and create an ugly final design.

If you were to implement all of these website design tips for small businesses, your marketing website can result in huge improvements. That can vary from increasing your website's performance, experience, and ending it with client conversion rates. You may also feel that the current website that you have may need a clean and simple refresh.

Although this is undoubtedly a scary process that lots of companies are afraid of, you are not alone here. Therefore, whether you're not too sure how exactly you can find them and where you should start, start with a website design company that can understand and comprehend the needs of your target market. This way, you'll be one step closer to achieving the goals you have put before yourself and before your business.