Nowadays, most businesses and individuals alike have a website. Anyone who operates online needs one as this is the only way to get the visibility and exposure you need. However, just having a website is not really enough to impress modern consumers.
As a matter of fact, your website needs to meet all kinds of criteria regarding both visuals and functionality so that it can meet ever-growing consumer needs. This is where a great website design comes into play. That said, if you don’t know how to make such a design yourself, you can always consider consulting with a web design agency to help you out in this endeavor.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you have a website design awesome enough to capture the attention of your visitors and encourage them to stay on your pages as long as possible.
After all, the longer people stay and browse your website, the greater the likelihood that they will take the desired action and convert into paying customers. With that in mind, here are some of the essential elements of a great website design.
Awesome visuals for your website
Visuals are one of the most important aspects of a great website design. Every person who lands on you pages will form their first impression based on visuals alone. If they like what they see, they will more likely stick around to explore. If not, they’ll bounce right off and look elsewhere.
Therefore, the overall design of your website should include well-considered layout and color scheme, individual visual elements like images and videos, typography, fonts and other visual aspects that will make your website and its pages more appealing and aesthetically pleasing.
That being said, humans are visual beings and we are more drawn to various visual elements over plain text. That’s why your website design must look pretty so that it can leave an impactful first impression on your website visitors.
Seamless website navigation
If there is one thing that modern consumers expect from every website they visit, it’s seamless browsing experience. That eventually boils down to intuitive and simplified navigation. As you may already know, consumers don’t have a lot of patience these days and even the slightest inconvenience will drive them away.
Therefore, it’s of the utmost importance to ensure that your website visitors can go form one page to where they want to go as seamlessly as possible. That includes implementing elements like search bars, drop down menus, breadcrumbs, internal links and so on.
What’s more, you have to ensure that there are no missing pages, redirects or errors on your website. The main reason is that if your visitors hit a dead end, they’ll most likely bounce. That’s why you should keep everything simple and user-friendly so that consumers don’t get frustrated while navigating your pages.
Responsive vs. adaptive design for your website
Another one of the most important elements of a great website design is mobile-friendliness. Most people today use smartphones to browse the Internet so it’s very important to ensure that your website can accommodate them accordingly. This is where you have to choose between a responsive or adaptive design for your website.
That said, a responsive design adjusts everything on your website and individual pages in accordance with user device and screen size. It’s a cheaper but often less reliable approach to ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly.
Adaptive design, on the other hand, is basically multiple versions of your website designed specifically for each type of device, such as PC, laptop, smartphone and tablet.
Your website is basically able to switch formats based on user device with adaptive design. This approach is faster and more reliable but it’s also much more expensive to implement. In the end, the choice you make is based on how great of a user experience you want to provide for your customers and website visitors alike.
Organzing and categorizing your website pages
When it comes to organizing and categorizing your website pages, the key is to keep things simple. Start by creating a hierarchy of categories that will help you organize your content in a logical way. This means that each page should have one main category, with subcategories for more specific topics.
For example, if you have a blog about travel, you could create a “Travel” category with subcategories such as “Destinations”, “Accommodation” and “Activities”. Consumers like when everything is laid out for them so they don’t have to bother too much looking for something.
Whether it’s content pages or product pages, the more you organize and categorize everything, the more enjoyable browsing experience your visitors will have. They can simply browse like there’s no tomorrow while you focus on encouraging them to convert using different offers and promotions. In other words, a well-structured website is an absolute necessity these days.
Website speed and page loanding time
As mentioned before, modern consumers have very little patience in general, not just when it comes to browsing websites. The thing they hate the most is slow loading pages and poor website speed.
That said, even a single second delay in page loading time can result in 16% reduction in customer satisfaction, 11% reduction in page views and 7% reduction in conversion rates. That may not seem as much but that’s actually a significant blow to your bottom line when looking at things long-term. Therefore, do everything you can to optimize your website well and improve page loading time, as well as the overall speed on your website.
You can leverage various strategies ranging from minifying code and using browser caching to utilizing CDN (Content Delivery Network) and changing hosting plans. Moreover, you will constantly have to monitor page loading time and website speed so that you can make immediate improvements should things start to slow down for any reason.
A great website design is basically a mix of great visuals and exceptional performance. Although that’s tricky to balance out, it’s not impossible to do so. As long as you have the right strategy in mind and consumer best interest in mind, you can create a truly amazing website design that will leave everyone in awe.
