Website design tips - the art of competition

Once you understand the fundamentals of website design (particularly as it relates to search marketing and online strategy) you are able to make informed choices that benefit your business.

Great website design is part art and part science. Most business owners (wisely) prefer to leave the art up to those with a keen eye and extensive visual training. But the science side is something that you can familiarise yourself with. This puts you in a powerful position to monitor, measure and analyse the effectiveness of your own website – so you can stay ahead.

Your website must balance design with content

The internet is a visual space, no doubt about it, and people respond well to beautiful design, layout and imagery.

However, most business websites have commercial intent at their heart and must take this into account when balancing design with content.

People looking for products or services need to be able to:
  • find what they are looking for quickly
  • get a sense of trust and integrity from a site
  • compare different products, services, businesses and websites
  • have questions answered, queries responded to and communication made easy
These essentials are generally much more dependent on text than on images. Of course if you sell products you need to have high quality images easily accessible on your site.

Importantly you need to provide crucial information so that customers are able to assess the value of your offer. If this is not apparent they will jump off your site and find a website that is easier for them to navigate and use.

Is your website design obscuring you from search engines?

This is the number 1 priority. A website that has simple, clean design and thorough search optimisation strategy is 100 times more valuable than a site overloaded with flash, animation, video and other features that look great to the human eye but are essentially INVISIBLE to search engines.

At present, the easiest thing for search engine spiders to read is plain text.

This doesn't mean you should avoid these elements all together. It means utilise them in such a way that search engines CAN read your content. And, above all, make sure the copy on your site is well written, optimised for strong keywords, relevant, easy to read and contains valuable information.

Make your website easy and intuitive to navigate

A new visitor to your site will give you less than a few seconds before deciding if it’s worth staying. Clear messages and obvious navigation with strong titles and headlines are essential to keeping them there.

You need to know WHAT a potential customer is likely to be looking for when they come to your site and HOW to make it as easy as possible for them to find it.

If you are attracting people via an ad or other marketing campaign, read more here about the importance of landing pages.

The 2 most important things that must be evident within those few seconds are:
  1. Does this site have what I want and how do I access it?
  2. What action is this website inviting me to take and do I feel compelled to do it?
If your site is leading people to online sales, then you need to have clickable, fast paths through the sales process.

If your site is leading people to information so you can collect their details and then market to them at a later stage, then you need to have compelling copy, inviting calls to action and easy to find opt-in actions.

You also need to consider the titles of your pages in the navigation bar and be wary of pages that take a long to time load and effects such as Flash that may not work on every computer and/or get in the way of easy navigation.

The logic of your navigation is crucial. People must be able to see essential information on your home and main section pages. From that, give them easy directions (drop down menus, side bars etc) so that they can ‘drill down’ to more specific and thorough information if they choose.

For more website design tips, or to learn about search optimisation and what it can do for your website and business, contact ASENZ today.