Web design is continuously changing and it’s important to know what techniques work and which ones don’t. If you are creating a new site or are about to re-design the current one that you have, you will make sure you want to include these 5 features into it. They are essential to a properly working website that will retain visitors and help convert them.
Superior Navigation
A design flaw in a lot of websites is their navigation potential. They attract people to their site, but then those people have such a hard time trying find the content they want to look at, that they just eventually leave. You will want to make sure that you have a great navigational system that includes multiple different ways for people to find relevant content. Other than your main navigation bar, you should also consider implementing a side bar, search bars, internal links throughout your content, footer links, and a site map. All of these a great options that increase your user’s experience and will also ensure than spiders can crawl throughout your site with no problems. The easier it is for spiders to crawl, the better chance your pages will be indexed properly.
Optimized Images
Images are a large part of having a successful design. The only problem with this is that if they are not optimized properly, they could create some bad loading problems for your users. Since you should be expecting that a big portion of your viewers are going to be checking you out on their phone, your load times need to be as short as possible. Not only do your users need to have short load times, but search engines have load speeds implemented in their algorithms. So if you are trying to improve your SEO, then having fast speeds will help you out.
There are plenty of factors that go into how fast a website loads, but images usually will place a major factor. You should also make sure that the images are responsive so that it doesn’t matter what device people are using, the images are always sized perfectly.
Increased Conversion Rate Techniques
Every website has a goal, and converting people will be the only way that the goal is going to be met. Your site should have as many techniques implemented to help out with converting as many people as possible. Whether you are a blog looking for people to subscribe or you are a full business that are trying to make more sales, design should be able to help you achieve your goals. Techniques such as call to actions buttons or properly placed relevant products are just a couple examples of how a good design will help to improve your conversion rates.
Consistent Design Style Throughout the Whole Website
There have been plenty of new styles that are implemented each and every year, but only a few will truly be successful. One thing that all successful websites have is a consistent style throughout the entire site. Using different styles can be confusing and might give the wrong impression about your website. While you may think that keeping everything consistent is just common sense, there are plenty of sites out there that change up how their site looks on a page by page basis. So just make sure that your entire sites matches and can be considered quality.
Organized Content
Having an organized website is essential to attracting and keeping new visitors. A site that has a cluttered design won’t be able to hold people for a long time because they will have too many things going on to be able to focus or find what they want to look at. Keeping the design simple and easy to use will be much more effective and won’t make your site run into any problems. Some examples of unorganized content would be having multiple ads, links, widgets, and side bars all on the same page. It’s just too much and won’t be visually appealing to your visitors.
There are plenty of successful design features that you can implement in your site, but these 5 are essential to having a successful website.
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About the Author:
This is a guest post contributed by Ness on behalf of MakeAWebsite – a hosting review website that enables users to have a better idea of how web hosts perform. They provide reviews on well-known hosting companies such as http://www.webhostinghub.com and a whole lot more.
