6 Web Design Tips to Build Successful Websites
Did you know a business could lose many customers if its website design is too complex and challenging to navigate? In fact, 38 percent of potential and existing customers will switch to another competitor brand instead of interacting with a poorly designed website.
Most customers will not return to a website after their first lousy user experience, so set yourself up for website success before going live the first time around.
Here are the top web design tips to keep in mind when with website design:
Easy navigation
High-quality images
Simple homepage design
Social share and follow buttons
Mobile-friendly design
Scannable content
Let’s dive deeper into these web design tips.
1. Easy navigation
Navigation is one of the essential features of a responsive design. Technically, all the web pages you see today have a navigation bar, which typically includes menu items, a search bar, and probably a hamburger menu for mobile devices.
Visitors should be able to access the links to all top-level pages in one place. This will save them from the unnecessary hunt, which increases your website's bounce rate. Check out City Air Experts Heating and Cooling's homepage below and how the navigation bar is well-arranged to help visitors find the resource they need.
Consider using drop-down options for submenu lists, too.
If you're designing an e-commerce or entertainment website, you'll have to deal with many subcategories or submenu lists. Create umbrella categories at the top, then place the subcategories under a drop-down menu, as shown below.
Scrolling right back to the beginning of a webpage can be a big hassle. Do your visitors a favor by adding the "Back To Top" action button. For mobile responsiveness, use a scalable icon, preferably an "arrow up" label, as shown by the CSS tricks below.
While drop-down menus are very useful in creating a responsive navbar, they can't show all the links on your website without looking messy. So, use a mega footer to display additional links at the bottom.
The bottom line is that you should create easy navigation to enhance the user experience. Easy navigation will boost sessions on the website. Additionally, since prospective customers will always find what they're looking for, it can increase sales.
2. Add high-quality images
Images can be used as an essential element to engage customers or visitors without needing much textual content. They can also help improve your search rankings on search engines. For example, Google has a search section that allows users to see image results. If website images are optimized with the right alt tags, they can appear in these results.
There are some things you need to keep in mind when adding images to a website:
Every section of a website reflects the owner's professionalism. Adding low-quality images to your website will do more harm than good. Blurry images hurt the user experience. That's why you need high-resolution images.
Another web design tip you must remember is that humans are more susceptible to visual illustrations than text. So avoid stock photos and use images that add value to the content. Your images should support the copy. That's why screenshots, illustrations, and videos are standard B2B web design practices. The Slack homepage is an excellent example of this:
Website design tips dictate adding visual illustrations and photos to your website to capture your audience's attention. Be specific with the alt tags used for each image you add. As previously noted, this could help a website's search engine optimization (SEO).
Using large images with excessive file sizes can affect a site's loading time. So a good web design tip is to compress and use lazy loads. In addition, some web hosting services can reduce your website's loading time by providing the necessary image optimization tools, thus contributing to an excellent mobile experience for your visitors.
3. Keep the homepage clutter-free and simple
How visitors interact with a website depends on their first impression after landing on the homepage. Therefore, any homepage you have designed must be neat. The menus need to be clear and clickable. Use white space sufficiently to ensure the critical elements stand out. Add high-quality and engaging images to support the copy. Also, avoid huge chunks of text. Freshbooks gets it nicely with this homepage.
Keeping a website homepage simple and clutter-free, like the Freshbooks website, is one of the top website design tips.
Other web design tips to help you build a great homepage include:
Aesthetic elements are invaluable.
We can't overemphasize the importance of adding visually appealing elements. While keeping your homepage simple, be sure to use high-quality images, vibrant colors, vertical art, and icons wherever necessary.
Personalize your homepage with awesome fonts.
Use fonts that are simple yet engaging. Mixing sans-serif and serifs can disrupt the font consistency of your page and can make your content difficult to read. Another thing to keep in mind is your font size. A font size of 16 pt is reasonably apt, even for people with visual difficulties. Also, avoid using more than three font types.
4. Include social share and follow buttons
Approximately 4.14 billion people use social media. That is more than half of the world's population. Therefore, it's highly likely that a client's target audience uses social media. So include social share buttons to encourage existing website visitors to share the website content with others on social media. This web design tip is especially essential for e-commerce and marketing blogs.
Place social and follow buttons in noticeable areas, like the top and left side of your page. Another strategic location is at the end of your blog posts or on a sticky bar. Some of the most popularly used social media buttons are Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn.
Website design tips: Include social share and follow buttons in a sticky nav below examples:
Adding follow buttons for social media handles can also be placed in the footer section, like Barnes & Noble below.
Including social profile links in the footer of your website, like Barnes & Noble, is one of the top website design tips. Be sure to describe the purpose of the social buttons; if the icons are for social sharing, point that out. If they are for following the brand's social media accounts, mention that the site visitors can follow the brand on social. This is especially important if the icons are not in the footer.
5. Mobile-friendly pages
You might be surprised to hear that 61 percent of internet users will ditch a website that is not mobile-friendly. Mobile-friendly pages are crucial considering the shift to using mobile devices to access the internet. Therefore, designers must optimize web pages for mobile devices to retain visitors and deliver a great user experience. Do these things to optimize a website for mobile use:
Use scalable hero images and aesthetic icons.
Use a different hero image for your mobile content and limit the available functionalities while still maintaining relevance. Prioritize the use of scalable icons like a hamburger menu for drop-down navigation. A hamburger menu is a sandwich-like icon that opens a side menu or navigation bar when clicked.
Keep mobile content simple.
Simplicity is still one of the most important web design tips to keep in mind. On the mobile page, keep things simple. Reduce the amount of information stacked on a single mobile page. Also, ensure all the information on the web pages, including images, can be viewed correctly through a mobile device.
Be sure to prioritize speed.
Mobile-friendly pages shouldn't just look good and be scalable. They should load faster without a hitch. You can manually minify images and code to achieve a faster speed. Alternatively, you can use speed plugins for WordPress websites to improve the site speed. The beauty of optimizing a web page's loading speeds is it'll also benefit SEO. Google confirmed that site speed is a ranking factor because it affects the user experience.
6. Create scannable content
One of the top web design tips you need to know is to create scannable content. When someone visits your website, scanning through the content on-screen should take less than a few seconds. Most users will likely hit the exit button if it takes longer to scan through.
To prevent this, you need to implement a flexible visual hierarchy. Users should be able to locate the information they need and focus their energy on reading just that. Also, an excellent visual order should guide users from the most critical sections down the page. Keep these web design tips in mind to create scannable content:
Break content into bullet points or make use of headers (H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5)
Use visual weight to feature essential sections. You can use a different background or text color to highlight an essential element from the rest.
Include a call-to-action or more navigation options so that users are not left blank after reaching the end of the web page.
A good practice is to use a larger font size for hero text and gradually scale down to smaller sizes for the website's body.
Even though you might not be building the actual website, you should consider these six design elements. You want your customers to find you online and have a great experience engaging with your website, and the Moonbus is great with making website enhancements. Do you need help with your navigation bar, image sizes, adding social media links, a chatbot, or making your website mobile-friendly? Let us help. Give us a call at 704.268.9566, email us, or schedule an appointment.