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Website Design Rules for a Stellar Site
Websites are the backbone of your marketing! Everything you do should point your audience back to your site in some way. For instance, on social media, your website needs to be linked in the bio section. On print materials like brochures or posters, your website needs to be clearly marked to make it easy for your potential clients to know what to do next. You want all of your marketing strategies to point to your website because that is your home base on the internet. That is where your potential clients can learn all about you, connect with you, and hopefully decide to contact you. If you do all of those steps right and your audience successfully goes to your site to continue learning what you are all about, and your site looks outdated, boring, or even clunky, then all of your hard work will be for nothing!
When your website isn’t up to speed, it sends multiple messages to your visitors, perhaps that you have a poor quality of work or that you aren’t current with the times. This may lead them to think that if your website isn’t in tip-top shape, your work for them won’t be current, professional, and forward-moving. Your potential customers are looking for someone to help them do things they cannot do on their own, which means they are looking for the most professional, qualified team out there. Having a stellar website will make all of the difference in the eyes of your audience!
The flow of your website is EVERYTHING! It is very easy to get overwhelmed when you click on someone’s web page, and there are many off-shoot pages to click on. A good flow of information makes the process easy for your audience. A best-case scenario is when someone can immediately see who you are and what you are about (not massive paragraphs, just quick bits of information) to see how you can help them and understand what you want them to do next. This is known as your call to action (CTA)!
Call to actions can be a range of things, like for a visitor to call to book an appointment, download an email magnet lead, or to learn more about a specific item you are trying to focus on. Your CTA can just be anything; it needs to be strong and convince people to act on what you are trying to sell. Many times it is good to have your CTA reinforced a few times throughout, which brings us to balance and repetition!
Something that came on strong in 2020 and is continuing into 2021 is balance and repetition! When you are designing your site, these are key concepts to keep in mind. A great thing to repeat on your site is your CTA, but many things can fall in the repetition bracket. These are things like using the same icons or design elements repeatedly throughout your site.
If you use circles in your logo, then repeating circles throughout your webpages in different ways reinforces your brand identity and makes your website feel uniform and professional. Balance doesn’t have to mean that you have the same things on each side to keep things even. If you think wayyy back to grade school art class, you probably learned about balance in design. Balance refers to visual stability, where your eyes still find balance on the page without the design elements being an exact mirror copy. Your website will look fun and exciting if you add balance through visual stability!
Having adequate white space is very important! We talked about why having a good flow in your site and main focus points is a must. White space helps you achieve the perfect flow you are after! White space doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be the color white either, it just means that you need to focus on clutter control and a more minimal approach. The less convoluted your website is, the easier it will be for your audience to understand the main points of your business.
In fact, when it comes to ‘white space, ’I almost encourage you to go a little outside of the box with your color scheme! Dark mode has become increasingly popular with new social media and phone software updates, so I think it is only a matter of time that the dark websites start booming as well! White is perfect for a clean, sophisticated look, but a darker color brings in a very modern and futuristic look. There is a time and place for both, and that really depends on what your business and brand is all about!
Your website load time has always been a huge factor in your SEO, so this point is not going anywhere anytime soon! It is fun to think about the design of your site and how pretty it looks, but it means nothing if you have a SUPER slow loading time. Studies show that if your web pages take longer than three seconds to load, your visitors are highly likely to leave right then and there! If you want to check out your page’s current loading speed you can with Google’s PageSpeed Insights! A few things to keep in mind with optimizing your web pages are reducing how many times you redirect your visitors to different pages on your site and optimizing the size of all of your images so they load faster.
If you are looking for a modern and user-friendly site to really step up your game in 2021, let’s talk!