Last updated on March 2nd, 2023 at 09:19 am
Getting a website up and running these days is pretty easy. With so many great website building services and freelance web developers out there, it doesn’t take long before you can have a fully-functioning website for your brand, a portfolio, or anything else that you can think of. However, if your aim is to get people to notice your website (as is usually the case with a business website) then you’ll want to consider some of the more important elements that can have a huge positive impact on its popularity and ability to draw in users.
In this post, we’ll be covering six important elements of good website design that you need to incorporate if you’re serious about getting it noticed.
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1. Visual design can make a huge impact
We tend to enjoy using websites more when it’s pleasing to the eye. Soft fonts, colors that complement each other, and careful design choices can all contribute to a better visual design that makes your website a lot easier to digest with the eyes.
However, the focus here should be on clean design and not something extremely unique and animated. Sure, animations and interactive menus can look great when used properly, but they’re also extremely taxing on devices and are generally unnecessary. Remember that the function of your website is to provide value to your customers, not to be seen as a piece of artwork that you’ve spent a lot of time and money on.
2. Embracing all types of SEO
While many people know what search engine optimization is, they might not know about the four types of search engine optimization. This includes on-page SEO, off-page SEO, local SEO, and technical SEO. By using all four of these together, you can create a much stronger website that will appeal to a wider audience. But what exactly do these mean?
- On-page SEO refers to anything that is on your website. This can include keywords and content.
- Off-page SEO is anything that isn’t on your website that contributes to your SEO strength. For example, it could mean other websites that link to your pages.
- Technical SEO refers to the important technical factors of your website such as speed, mobile optimization, and also site structure.
- Local SEO is all about SEO that relates to your local area. This is usually used by businesses that have physical stores.
All four of these SEO types are important to use, so make sure you understand each of them, their use cases, and how you can optimize them with your content.
3. Analyze your website’s performance
You’d be surprised at how much you can learn once you start analyzing your website’s performance and other related metrics. For instance, uptime monitoring is a great way to examine when your website goes down, why it’s gone down, and also discover what you can do to potentially fix it in the future. A lot of people don’t realize that website uptime should be as close to 100% as possible.
If your host is anywhere below 99%, then it’s a problem that you need to fix. Sometimes this could be caused by things that you’ve done, such as accidentally changing configuration settings or having a website that is too intensive to run on the host. However, this is usually down to the quality of the host and is something that you’ll need to speak to them about.
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4. Slick website navigation
If you’ve ever struggled to find something on a website then you’ll know exactly how annoying badly-designed navigation can be. When you create your website, it’s essential that you try to categorize things into easy-to-understand sections so that it makes your website much easier to navigate. This can be tricky at first, but it’ll be much easier once you get a better idea of the type of content that you want to post for your viewers.
Other sections that you may want to optimize are product categories, and also having clear labels for things like contact information so that people can see at a glance how to get in touch with you.
5. Content to provide value to your viewers
When people visit your website, they want to get content from it that actually means something to them. They want to see what things you’ve written and they want to learn from your knowledge. They want to be wowed by your product descriptions, and they also want to easily be able to find technical information.
When creating content, you need to think about the value it provides to your customers and not just what it can do for your search engine optimization. A good example here is the divide between creating content that is readable for Google’s bots and content that is readable by human beings. While Google prefers a certain type of content that is easier to rank, you have to remember that SEO sometimes makes an article or product description a bit harder for real humans to read.
So by focusing your efforts on creating content for humans, you can grow an organic audience and create more impactful pieces that people actually care about. This is a lot better than hyper-optimized content that is not only difficult to read but rarely provides actual value to your viewers.
6. Engagement
Last but not least, make sure that you have plenty of options for engagement. It could be a simple sharing widget so that people can post about one of your products on social media, or it could be a clear link or form that encourages your potential customers to seek a quote or contact you. Engagement and interactivity also go hand in hand, so you may also benefit from investigating the opportunity to install some kind of chatbot on your business website. A chatbot can be such a brilliant feature for your platform, as it can allow you to offer an enhanced level of customer service for your visitors that you would never be able to achieve otherwise. Installing one of the best chatbots for customer service on your website could be the turning point that encourages visitors to properly engage and explore, as it can help to offer clarity by answering questions, as well as offering peace of mind by handling any complaints at the same time. If you don’t believe a chatbot would work for your unique business needs, then a simple submission form with a few well placed questions could be just as beneficial to get the engagement and fee scan you need. The more options you have for engagement, the easier it’ll be to convert interest into paying customers in the future.
Just make sure you’re not constantly notifying your viewers about engagement opportunities. Make them easy to see but don’t shove them in the face of your audience because it can quickly get obnoxious and frustrating to deal with. When that happens, they’re no better than traditional popups.
