Website design is the first contact customers have with your company, and it is made even before they choose to trust your firm to make a call. A complicated homepage or a page that takes too much time to download might result in losing the client before he even learned more about the services or products you provide.
The main thing here is not to impress the customer with beautiful design. What really counts is to inform him of what kind of products or services your firm provides and what action needs to be taken next. Here are things that should be considered while planning the website design.
- Homepage design and structure
Homepage is the page where clients land upon visiting the website. Therefore, the primary purpose of the homepage is to guide the user to the right location within the site. It includes clear navigation, brief and clear description of the activities of your firm near the top of the page and an obvious way of proceeding to the next step (contacting you or looking through services). Complicated homepage will hardly ever be informative and will rather fail to convey the information you need. Just ask some people, who haven’t seen the homepage of your website before to find the contacts within ten seconds.
- Color and typography
Color and typography choices are more than just aesthetics; they also carry some message before anybody starts to read. Consistent color palette creates recognition over time, and readability of the typography which means appropriate color contrast, legible font sizes and sufficient amount of white space makes people read instead of squinting and closing pages. It’s especially true for mobile devices where most visitors land first. Two or three colors used consistently will always be better than five colors used sporadically even if all of them are nice individually.
- Mobile first approach
Currently, most traffic of small business websites comes from mobile devices, not desktops. So it should be designed first for mobile platform and then scaled up. Website which looks nice on laptops but fails, becomes too slow or requires horizontal scrolling on mobile is missing most of its potential customers before they start reading.
- Accessibility
Design considerations that help all users, such as readable color contrasts, clearly-labeled features, and logical sequence for keyboard navigation, do not pertain to an insignificant group of website users. These elements make your website accessible to a wider audience, and today it becomes the norm that is increasingly expected from businesses. In other words, a website that works only well for visitors with good sight and mouse may exclude potential customers that a website owner may not even realize about.
- Updating your design without following each trend
Design trends keep changing all the time, but very few of them are worth paying attention to. The things worth updating include the aspects that affect usability: loading times, site behavior on new mobile devices, broken layouts due to updates since the website was initially created. A website that functions well for its users does not need to be redesigned simply because the look became outdated. Following trends for the sake of it is what leads websites to the need of another redesign eighteen months down the road.
- Selecting the builder
Unless you plan to build the website yourself, the choice of a person or agency who will carry out this task is more important than the choice of the platform for building it. Ask to see examples of previously built websites by this person or agency and focus on their durability over time, not on the initial appearance. The time spent on making a clear brief, explaining your business, target audience, and goals you have before your visitors is much less than the time spent choosing a web-designer based only on the cost. It is also worth asking about the future of your website.
- The design and the search performance are not two separated aspects of the website
It is natural for most people to consider design and search performance as two different things. However, the connection between them might surprise many business owners. A slow loading page, wrong image size, layout changes during the loading process – all of these aspects influence the rating of a page by search engines, not only the experience of users. Thus, even an absolutely perfect-looking website can work against you if all of these aspects are not checked properly. This is one of the reasons why design aspects should be reconsidered when marketing activities take place.