12 Essential Tips for Improving your Web Design in 2022
Can your visitors choose what your company does within five seconds of landing on your website? Could users efficiently navigate to the blog if they are required to? Is the design of your pricing manageable to comprehend? Does your website have a low bounce rate?
If your answer is ‘no’ to these questions, it might be a time to take a hard look at how you’ve been planning and optimizing your website.
A website excels when it has a design that provides user experience functionality and correctly completes your content. The final thing you want is to be consuming time writing some great content on your blog or service pages, only for it to go unseen due to design defects, navigation issues, illogical layouts, or ignored conversion options.
So, what do you need to understand to start improving your web design?
To answer that, here are 12 website tips to ensure that you’re going in the right direction in your redesign and are providing you aren’t turning visitors away.
1. Have a Plan
Now that you’ve realized that your site probably needs some improvements, it’s time to work your path back and create a strategy detailing how you’ll dive them. Start by mapping out your customer journey from the first time someone visits your website to the point they become a customer.
When doing this, think about which pages are they going to view, what content are they going to read, and what offers are they going to convert on. Comprehending this will help you design a site that boosts leads through the sales funnel.
2. Remove Distractions and Reduce Clashes.
Some aspects of your website will detract from the value and message you’re trying to convey. Complex animations, content that’s too long, and “stocky” website images are just a few examples.
With an audience that only has an attention span of eight seconds, you need to create it abundantly clear what your user will understand on the page they’re viewing, and your design must not detract from this.
This should describe your font styles, colours, imagery, iconography, and logo usage. Without this, it’s easy for brands to struggle when designing pages. You’ll probably start to see random colours and varying font styles and sizes used, which in turn can distract from your message or create visual confusion for people trying to convert.
It’s also essential to avoid too many on-page animations or interactions. If you’re scrolling through a page and see every button pulsing or a section of icons, each with its vitality, it can sense overwhelming and distract them from reading what’s on the page.
Details like this help create or break your overall website experience and help your users comprehend what you want them to do, leaving less room for confusion.
3. Add Social Proof
Impactful testimonials from real people have a great user experience; studies show your prospects are 58% more likely to buy your product. But how should your testimonials be visually examined, so they create that trust with your users when they see them?
Well, there are a few techniques you can take. But instead, you need to consider what testimonial format you want, text or video. Historically, video testimonials are the best. This is because the medium inherently keeps your user’s attention more extended and makes a more robust human link to hear voices and see human faces.
Regardless, you also can text testimonials, which will even help build trust with your users when developed and integrated correctly.
If you aren’t eventually equipped with testimonials, you’ll likely have a case studies page where you can talk in detail about everything you did to help your customers. Ultimately, if your site only has text testimonials without case studies, there are aspects you need to be cautious of when designing them out.
When it comes to places to include testimonials on your website, homepage, service pages, and a dedicated testimonial page in your navigation must be the most suitable option. Each of these pages is the best touchpoint for people learning about your company and considering buying.
Testimonials will improve your website’s experience and build trust with your options before they become clients.
4. Implement Call-to-action
Once your visitors land on your website, you need to guide them to places that will help stimulate them to conversion. Suggest them in the right direction, so they don’t struggle to find what they are looking for.
One of the best forms to improve your web design with this in mind is to use strategically positioned call-to-action in areas such as the top right of your navigation, below sections that require action, and at the bottom of your website pages. But don’t lose sight of your buyer’s trip.
5. Use the Right Stock Images.
We always suggest using authentic photography on your website, but if that’s not an alternative, there are tactics you can use to help pick out the correct type of stock photo.
While stock photos save you the span of producing your imagery, many websites have imagery that slips into cliche. You’ll also find many other websites showcasing the same imagery, which doesn’t help your credibility.
So, when selecting stock photos, try to stay away from these cheesy images. These are the pictures of people high-fiving with inflated smiles, groups looking at the camera, leaders in superhero outfits, groups of suited people jumping in the air. When was the last time you saw people in these scenarios in real life?
Pick the candid images and ones in real-life settings rather than studios. This could be individuals in an office chatting over a meeting table in business casual clothing, over-the-shoulder shots of people typing on a laptop, people sketching on a whiteboard in an open room. These are the types of scenes others will start to identify as fair.
Being more mindful with your photography will help sufficiently represent your brand and how you want others to perceive it.
6. Managed Navigation
When designing your website, navigation is necessary. It’s essentially the map that shows the core places users can visit. It’s how users can quickly dive deeper into areas such as your services, products, blog, etc.
There’s nothing worse than a site with a messy or confusing navigation interface. Poor structure practices such as overfilling your navigation, using incomplete or confusing hypertext, and missing organization can make it hard for visitors to find where they want to go.
If users cannot find what they’re looking for, they have no reason to stay on your site. Instead, they will bounce and find a competitor that offers a more pleasing user experience.
When improving your website’s navigation, it’s essential to ensure that your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for. This would include streamlined content, navigation hierarchy, and responsive design, so the mobile experience doesn’t drastically change.
7. Let your Visitors Scroll on your Homepage.
Each nav item has ample space to clear where the separation is. In some cases, like in the image overhead, the menu item will even have a descriptive line to provide more context to the purpose of that page. The hover effect also explains that these links will go to another page.
Users can get to these places with one click with comfort, so make sure you’re enacting a similar strategy (without overloading your navigation).
Clean and organized navigations will let the user know that you want them to have an easy time driving around your website. As a result, your users are more likely to visit higher pages during their session, increasing their time spent on your website.
8. Don’t be afraid of White Space.
Whitespace is an essential design feature that helps split up the page and increase readability. Also called “negative space,” white space refers to the places around components on an empty page lacking content or visual items.
Whitespace also plays a vital role in designing and positioning website elements. While more whitespace can dictate what areas are distinct and guide the vision, less whitespace can dictate which details are related to one another due to their proximity.
This allows users to concentrate on each part of a website page piece by piece and instantly know where each section begins and ends. This can do wonders for supporting guiding your user’s eye to essential information such as a call-to-action or value proposition.
9. Mobile Optimization is Crucial Nowadays.
These days, it is critical that you take the time to optimize your website for mobile. If you don’t already know, 80% of internet users own a smartphone, and “Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had problem accessing and 40% visiting a competitor’s site rather.”
Ask yourself, why would somebody access my site on mobile? What specialties would they look for? Does my experience presently allow them to do those things easily?
10. Easy to Find Pricing
If your site follows a way that lacks a pricing page, you’re heading to find your users baffled. Including it “allows visitors to complete their research and ultimately, qualify or disqualify themselves, preventing your sales team from wasting time on someone who isn’t a good match.”
11. Create a Self-selection Experience
Self Selection brings users through a series of questions to arrive at a specific result. These outcomes could be a custom quote, product, or an answer to a very high-level question.
Tools like this can make it significantly more convenient for people to comprehend what the best products or services are for them without them having to guide through your website to find the answer.
Also, the faster you get your options to what they are looking for, the quicker they might be to purchase it.
12. Test and Iterate
Your website needs to be a lively, evolving piece of your company, not stagnant. There is likely always room for modification. Enhancing certain areas of your website can aid in improving conversions, time on page, and pages per session, but knowing what solution might work best in improving your website is the tricky part.
This is where executing A/B tests comes in. Taking two-page variations and testing them against each other can reveal if specific areas are creating issues for your users.
Each test can show different data that identify why users interact with pages in specific ways.
Key takeaways
Abiding the time to execute these tips on your website can bring a dramatic shift that can help improve your website’s performance, experience, and client conversion rates. Even once you get some of these tips in place, you may consider that the more important project at hand is revitalizing your website with a redesign. This way, you’ll be that much more ahead of the game when a website redesign conversation reaches up in your organization, and you’ll feel more confident with what requires to be done.