With the development of online sales, creating a site becomes the only right solution to reach your target audience online. While offline companies are aimed exclusively at servicing their customers, modern websites have several goals at the same time: advertising services, quality service, increasing the image of the company, increasing the profits of the company, timely informing their customers, interacting with them, and much more.
The modern world of business is impossible to imagine without a network presence. “If you are not on the Internet, you are not!” A potential buyer visiting a company’s website will certainly have their own opinion at the subconscious level, which will determine their perception of the company itself. This attitude will affect the further actions of the visitor: he will become a client or will turn to other offers.
Therefore, it is necessary to take steps that will interest the potential client and allow you to choose your favorite. In this article, we will talk about the importance of proper website design, identify the main trends, and give you some tips.
What are the benefits of building a website?
Today, the company can hardly exist only offline. Because modern technology allows you to find goods for tens and hundreds of kilometers from you. And an online business has many important advantages, like interaction with customers around the world.
Now your company operates in only one city, region, or country. But your potential customers are all over the world. Why not allow them to work with your company? This will help the website. By making it international, you can achieve great heights by entering the international market.
Savings on Advertising
Are you still printing business cards and flyers? It’s time to save and grow your company on the Internet. Website promotion and company advertising on the network will cost 3-4 times cheaper than your printing costs. The result will be stunning because you will capture your target audience. Consequently, the company’s profit will increase.
Work on Company Reputation
A potential client who visited the office will be able to learn about the experience, opportunities, and additional services of the company only if he decides to communicate with the manager. Using the site, all such information can be demonstrated to each visitor without involving consultants. This will work for the image of the company and will provide convenience to your client, revealing the necessary and important information.
Make a Website with Quality Design and WEB-architecture
Web design is not only and not so much aesthetics as its internal functionality. The choice of design for the site can greatly affect the search engine promotion, which, in turn, affects the overall results of the site for its entire existence. Have a look at this example of a nicely made esports site.
Site Structure
Each site should have a well-thought-out logical structure. The user who is on the main page must immediately understand why this site is needed. And additional information is already being posted on other pages.
For example, if you create a recipe site, the main page can lead visitors to its separate pages with recipes for main dishes and desserts. Each of these auxiliary pages, in turn, can redirect traffic to separate subpages.
Some web resources have several “layers” of pages but do not go too deep, otherwise, it will be difficult for Google Spider to crawl them all. In general, try to have no more than three or four layers.
URL structure
URLs affect search engine promotion, so it’s important to choose the right ones right away. Here are some considerations for URLs:
- The shorter the better. short URLs are easier to remember
- Already in the URL itself, there should be some description of the content of the page. Use clear vocabulary, avoid complex abbreviations or arbitrary letters and numbers
Site Navigation
In addition to well-structured navigation, your sites should still be easy to navigate. The site menu should be placed at the top or on the sidebar.
Visitors should easily find any pages. Do not create orphan pages unrelated to the rest of the site’s pages. If visitors cannot find any pages using internal links, search engines will not know that these pages exist.
Mobile-friendly Design
The mobile era has arrived, and responsive design is already a prerequisite. For a site to provide good UX and to rank properly, it must be adapted for viewing on small screens. If you still do not have a responsive design, correct this gap. Test your site for mobile-friendly compliance with a simple tool from Google.
Load Speed
Website speed, along with responsiveness, is another aspect of the UX area that affects SEO. Google lowers slow websites in SERPs, and users are less likely to stay on the site if the page needs a few seconds to load. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will tell you how fast your sites are and tell you what needs to be improved.
Header, Title, and Description Tags
These are all important elements of on-page SEO. Each page of the site must contain unique content in the <title> tag – in other words, do not duplicate the same tags throughout the site. Each title tag must have at least one keyword, relevant page content. Also add keywords to the header tags on each page, especially in <h1>.
The description is descriptions that appear below links on search results pages. They do not directly affect SEO, but how many people click on your site’s link in the SERP depends on them. This, in essence, is a free ad slot, so it’s worth approaching the descriptions in all seriousness, adding key keywords, and attracting the attention of users.
Pictures and Images Optimization
Search engines cannot “read” and understand images (as yet), but you have the opportunity to tell the search engine what your images are about and what they relate to. Here are some things you can do to optimize your images for SEO:
- Choose the correct names for the images. For example, it is better to name the image png, but not img238.png
- Use tags for images. They will tell the search engine what is shown in the picture.
- Do not use excessively large images, as this may slow downloading.
Flash
The general rule is to avoid Flash if this is not necessary. Search engines do not see and do not process Flash content, therefore, concerning promotion, Flash does not exist. Do not use Flash for important sections of the site, such as the navigation bar and body text on pages.
Structured Data
It’s hard to say whether structured data, such as schema markup, add any momentum to the site in terms of search engine promotion. Be that as it may, they help to attract quality traffic to the site because users are provided with valuable information. Over time, structured data can improve the site’s position in the SERP.
Site Interface
SEO is not only technical details, but the interaction experience also plays a role, how convenient it is to use the site, how much it helps people. And although all of the above in this list is important, do not leave aside the actual design, especially if you are creating a site using the free constructor. On a beautiful and convenient site, people will linger longer and come back to it more often. It will be easier for them to find something, and the failure rate will below. A beautiful website design is also good for the image of the company.
How to Optimize Design for Visitors
- Correct the unpleasant design, which hurts the eyes and causes negative emotions. Otherwise, visitors will leave your online store, forum, or blog, immediately after they have visited it. Website design optimization is a task for an experienced designer or creative agency.
- Checking the adaptability of the site is a task that we recommend setting a high priority. After all, even thought-out online design resources that look perfect on widescreen monitors may not display correctly on smartphone displays. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the code and graphics for mobile devices.
- The design and promotion of the site are also associated with fonts – take the time and energy to choose the right family, size, and color. Texts are the most important part of blogs, portals, forums, and no less important element of online stores. But few people will read even cool articles if they are written in light gray 9-pixel Comedic Sans on a white background.
- Think navigation to the smallest detail. This is a design element that greatly affects whether a visitor returns to your site again or goes to competitors.
How to Optimize Website Design for Search Programs
- Do not overload web pages with style sheets or script files just to make them more beautiful. With each new line of code and each new graphic element added, the “weight” of pages increases and they begin to load more slowly. Neither visitors nor web crawlers like slow sites.
- Do not create navigation using JavaScript or Flash – search engines are not particularly good at these technologies. And this affects the usability of the site negatively – in browsers that do not support Flash and JavaScript or in which they are disabled, the site will be impossible to fully use.
- Place important text content at the top of the web page – this trick helps to speed up the movement of the site to the TOP-1.
- Add an internal search to the site. Some search engines regard it as an element that makes it convenient to use the site and encourage portals and online stores with an internal search for high positions in the search results.
Conclusion
Of course, there is no way to make a business 100% successful with quality design. First of all, you must offer a quality product. But a nice site with good functionality will help make your business famous and open it to new customers.
Bethany Watson
Latest posts by Bethany Watson (see all)
- Brand Positioning: Using Design to Marry Your Purposes with Customer Involvement - September 11, 2020
