When you are handholding your young startup as it takes its baby steps towards adolescence, it becomes difficult to handle all operational aspects. One critical issue that needs your attention is the security of the website and IT systems. While most small businesses do neglect this aspect, studies show that small businesses bear the brunt of these attacks. Mostly because they are unprepared against such attacks. A 2019 Ponemon report on the status of cybersecurity with small businesses showed that only 30% of the sample companies stated that they have adequate security postures against cyber threats. Understand how a secure website helps It always helps a startup if the founders understand the problem at hand. Similarly, it also helps if they are aware of the dangers of a potential data breach and the methods that can be deployed to prevent this from happening. Once you have an inkling about the issue at hand, do formalise a plan to address this issue. Devise a formidable secur...
Your website is the means of communicating with your target
market. The design of the website is such that your prospects can easily view
your messages and engage with the website simultaneously. However, website
design has evolved very fast. Gone are the days when parallax design would be
sufficient for your website, now you need to consider the colours, imagery,
typography and consistency when creating the website.
According to the digital marketing firm – Webfx,
75% of credibility comes from the design of the website. It means that most
visitors make an idea about the capabilities of a business based on the design
of its website. Astonishing, isn't it? No wonder companies spend their
marketing dollars on making an eye-catching website.
What is the outcome of having a poor website? Around 89% of
visitors move to
your competition, never to return. So, more and more companies are
increasing the amount of resources towards creating an easy to use website that
would woo visitors and allow you to take them through the buyer’s journey and
result in a sale. In this article, we will discuss some of the good website
design principles and help you meet the website goals.
Understand the objectives of the website
Before the designer starts to work on the website, the
storyboard needs to be created. You must research about why your target market
visits a website in your industry. Do they try to find answers to their
queries, or do they try to enter into a transaction? Or do they want to
interact with your website? In all these cases, the structure of your website
will be different from the other.
It should include the objectives of the website. What is the
primary purpose of the website? Will the website be used for branding purposes,
or will it be the primary source of leads? Once you finalise the objectives of
the website, the rest of the chips will automatically fall in place. Each of
the webpages must have a proper structure and a purpose that must be subtly communicated
to the visitor.
Focus on your target audience
While creating the concept about the website, we tend to
forget about the target audience. We are building the site for your prospects.
Your beauty will be rendered useless if your prospects find no value in it. As
a web designer, we must put ourselves into the feet of the prospect and try to
understand what they will try to find at the website. Before understanding
this, we must take a step backwards and understand the solution portfolio of
the client fully. We also must understand the demographics of the target market
and do some online research about the colours, patterns and textures that are
preferred by the age group. You may also go through an earlier blog written on
the principles of a good website.
User experience and usability
The most critical factors for your website are its usability
and hence, the user experience as an outcome. According to Steve Krug, user
experience is the feeling of emotion and intuition that a user has for any
product. The website navigation needs to be such that the visitor can easily
find the answer to the queries that he has in mind.
Is your website making visitors think? It should not, and
that could be a reason for the low CTR. Krug says that the webpage must be such
that the content should be apparent and there should not be any need to apply
one's mind. Another significant input is that visitors do not read the content
but undertake a scan of the page.
Place CTA buttons at the right places
One of the good website design principles involve the
Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons. You must inform the visitor what they can expect
if they click on the CTA button. It could be the download of a document or
registration for a newsletter or request a callback. Moreover, the CTA buttons
must be located above the fold and easily accessible to the visitor.
The CTAs on the homepage should be decided during the planning phase itself. Web designers need to be creative about the CTAs as it will draw the attention of the visitor and make them take the actions that you want them to take. Be innovative to make the CTAs interactive as well. While placing the CTA button, you must apply the rule of thirds. You need to divide the area with two equally spaced points where the lines meet will help you find how the visitor’s eye will move.
Design your website judiciously
Your users are bombarded with thousands of ads every day.
So, how will you stand apart and promote your portfolio? The best way is to
choose an innovative site design. When creating the website, you must keep the
branding of the client compatible throughout the site. Statistics reveal that using brand colours
improve recognition by over 80%. If the branding is not uniform, it will
make the visitor bewildered.
The real estate in the webpages must be utilised
judiciously. The webpage must not look crammed with either too much information
or with distracting elements. To understand the acceptability of a webpage, you
need to know the bounce rate. A high bounce rate would mean the quality of the
page is low, or the audience does not match with your webpage.
To adhere to the web development process best practices, you
must use the branding colours on all images, including the messaging, videos,
infographics, etc. When you are designing the web pages, you need to consider
the likes of your buyer persona. The colours that you use on the site must be
in sync with their tastes. You need to research the buyer habits that will
throw ample light on the colour and palette to be used on the site.
Make the website responsive
The changed website design principles also require the site
to be responsive, i.e. the site provides an optimal user experience across all
devices. As 62% of internet
users use their mobile devices, it becomes necessary for websites to cater
to this set of users too. Studies also found that 74% of users prefer to return
to mobile-friendly sites. Given that such a large number from the target market
will probably access your site while on the move, your site must function
properly for all devices.
The main requirement is to have images to scale
appropriately and accommodate a variety of screen sizes properly. Moreover,
search engines are also preferring responsive and mobile-friendly sites in
their continuing endeavour to improve user experience. They are SEO optimised
too as they share the same URL across all types of devices.
Web designers need to remember that for a responsive site,
the columns along with the height and width must be coded accordingly. When you
are trying to squeeze the menu onto the handheld device, a responsive site will
condense their menus into a button than can open when pressed. Moreover, as a
designer, you may opt to leave some portions by writing a piece of code.
Engage your visitors
Visitors prefer an engaging website that can ask relevant
queries and lead them to the specific portions in the website where they can
find answers to their questions. An ideal way to initiate communication with
the visitor is by using a chatbot. The visitors can easily interact with the
website as the bots can respond to most queries within a short time. Chatbots
can also help to take visitors through the buyer's journey effectively and also
upsell or cross-sell solutions based on the visitor's inputs.
Another of the critical website design principles is to make
the site engaging is to allow visitors to leave comments and clients to add
testimonials and reviews through the website. Your blogs must also have social
sharing buttons to enable users to share blogs if they like them. The website
must also have links to the social media pages that will also allow users to
visit the company pages if they wish.
Images are another means to engage with visitors. According
to a study by Hubspot, an
image associated with a piece of information ensures that visitors remember
65% of the information at least three days later. Images will attract more
visitors as they can convey information better.
Fashion websites can also utilise augmented reality to allow
visitors to virtually try on any accessory that they had shortlisted for buying
before adding them to the tray. Studies also show that virtual reality helps in
closure more effectively.
Don’t risk the visitors’ patience
How long do you wait for a website to load? Research shows
that if the webpage takes more than three seconds to load, visitors start
leaving the site exponentially. It becomes necessary that your site within a
stipulated time and starts interacting with the visitor. One way to optimise
the webpages is by crunching the images as they take up too much space. If you
are using WordPress, there are specialised plug-ins that help to reduce the
size of the images.
Using a content delivery network will also help. The static
files will be loaded on servers scattered geographically. When a visitor tries
to access the website, the site will be loaded from a server close to the user.
Very often, we find websites requiring us to fill complex forms and register
ourselves that would be if little use later. Such irrelevant activities form a
significant reason for visitors to quit the site never to come back. In case
visitor information is required to send newsletters, you can only request for
their names and email addresses. It should be enough.
Keeping the website simple
We have a feeling that the website must be flashy enough to
lure visitors. On the contrary, visitors prefer websites that have a simple
layout and design. The flow of the website should be easy, and the visitors
must not have too many questions on their mind. The content must also be
written such that it is easy to understand. There are various online software
that helps you judge the readability of the content. Most of these sites use
the Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease score. One way to do this is to implement the
pyramid writing style whereby the writer makes a point upfront and then goes on
to elaborate it.
Stress on what matters most
You must focus on what you are trying to communicate to the
larger market. It could be you are trying to stress on your customer support or
any of your USPs. However, you must decide on what could be the essence on
which the website must lay emphasis. Going back, you must again answer what is
it that visitors are asking from your business.
To be able to understand what you must emphasise upon, you
need to research your target market. Take note about their specific pain points
and what they look out for when searching for a solution. What are the various
factors they consider in their buying process, and how do they arrive at a decision?
Once you can identify their needs, you will be able to ascertain the buying
process that your target market entails. Accordingly, you must emphasise that
specific need.
Placing the content is key
Designers rarely care about the content that goes in. How do you feel if you have to review a document that is all
over the place? Similarly, the visitors to your website expect the content to
be placed in order. Most layouts are grid-based that require the webpage
content to be placed in a specific manner. Though it may seem some work to get
the content boxed, it is a relief for the visitor who is trying to find an
answer to his needs.
Your brand has a unique identity that is also communicated
how you place the content on your site. As a result, you must take extreme
caution when you are putting content on your site, and all portions must fit
seamlessly to form a cohesive structure.
Optimise your website for SEO
What is the use of the site if it cannot be found on the internet? The advent of SEO marketing requires us to ensure that the content is written according to the SEO best practices. Any expert web design best practices will pay attention to SEO activities. WordPress allows you to download plug-ins to help in SEO. You must remember to include the SEO tags along with the schema and XML sitemap.
The website content must be written by putting yourself in the shoes of the visitor. What are their interests? How to we keep them engrossed? When we are writing content, we must consider that the visitor will also skim through the content as time is of the essence. Moreover, you must choose easy to read fonts like Helvetica or Arial. You must also select the proper size and colour of the font so that it can cater to a variety of screen sizes.
You must also use alt tags for the images using the keywords and optimise internal linking throughout the site. Using keyword optimised content will also ensure that your website ranks high in organic ranking.
The bottom line
Websites are known to be your medium of communication and branding. It is also a significant means to gather leads, though a website can be used for other means too. You cannot use your design principles for a website. There are a few best practices that you must consider when developing a site. We have discussed some of them in this article. We sincerely hope it will help you to design better.
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