Have you ever visited a company’s website, found it difficult to navigate across, and just left? A poorly designed and incomplete company website can repel visitors and cause security breaches from hackers and their malware. Nowadays, having a well-designed website with top-tier security is one of the key criteria that customers judge your business on. Here are five tips for designing a professional and feature-rich website that represents your brand:
Align it With Your Company’s Goals
Your website should incorporate graphic elements and color patterns that are aligned with what your brand stands for. A company pushing a environmental initiative, for instance, can have a green header and footer with a tree or leaf design in the background. An industrial company could have rougher colors like grey and black with bolts and cogs for their clickable buttons. Whatever your business is, your design should reflect it. Within seconds of visiting your website, customers should already know what your brand is about without having to look at your “About Us” page.
Use Professional Development Tools
There is a plethora of useful application development tools out there that are free of charge and user-friendly. These development tools can expedite the process of building your website. There are packages or libraries that will even set up the foundation of the website through boilerplate code that you can run on your system so you don’t have to create everything from the ground up. And if you run into technical problems installing and setting up the code needed, there is a vibrant community of programmers and developers who can help you.
Get a Good, Relevant Logo
Your logo is at the frontlines when your website is served to customers by the server. A dull, confusing, or offensive logo can lose you customers. Have a well-thought-of logo that’s linked to your home page. Make sure to place it in a prominent location of your page. Make sure that the logo is high resolution and is featured in every web page. The logo should also be clickable and lead back to the home or profile page for easier navigation. If you are having troubles finding or creating a good logo design, work with a third-party graphic designer.
Limit the Content Featured on Your Website
Web surfers have an attention span that lasts less than 30 seconds. If you fail to grab their attention by then, they move on to the next website. You have limited time and a limited amount of space to work with. Complicated animations, overstretched paragraphs, and stock photos are few of the many elements that you should remove from your website. Instead, keep sections of content short but on point with clear divisions and detailed headers. Any confusing jargon and non-relatable terminology only serves to clutter your website and confuse your visitors.
SEO-tailored websites offer a ton of benefits to businesses. For instance, organic listings, listings that are at the top of search engine results pages, are basically free of charge. You don’t have to set aside a budget for marketing or pay per visitor click like in AdWords. There is, however, some learning curve involved for optimizing your content to be search engine-friendly. Still, with some slight effort, you can attract consistent traffic into your website with minimal to no cost.
These five techniques should be present in any and every web design and development project, regardless of type, size, and features included. Without a prominent and professional logo, your site loses its visual touch. Without design elements that align with your company’s vision and mission statement, you attract the wrong audience. Without any development tools, you’ll spend too much time working under the hood. Finally, without the right search-engine-optimized content on your webpages, you’ll be paying a lot more for PPC campaigns as well as fail to provide customers with the relevant information they need to make informed decisions.
Courtesy TheTopTier Digital Media