This is the next part of my previous article Why is a website important for your business.

Let’s get to it.

There is a high chance a client will look for you online before contacting you so your website is your customers first impression of your business or your brand, so it’s vital that you have a well designed website.

This cannot be overstated. If your website is unattractive, hard to navigate or non-existing, then you may be turning your customers away without knowing it.

Every professional web design should include the following elements:

  1. Solid navigation: When customers get to your site, they want to access information quickly and easily. If you want to keep them on your page, you should really make this as easy as possible. Nobody wants to waste time and struggle to find information, if your navigation is poor, you’ll discourage your customers from engaging on your page.
  2. Attractive and responsive design: Your site should be attractive and by using colors and images that align good with your site, it will make it pleasing to the eye. A professional website should have a good balance between an attractive design and good content that is easy to read and quick to load. With the growth in mobile devices, your website MUST also have a responsive design. This is CRUCIAL. Your clients will access your website from notebooks, smartphones, tables and desktop computers and it should look good on ALL of them! With a good design you ensure that each visitor has a positive experience.
  3. Purposeful visuals: Your site could integrate visual elements to help improve engagement on a website. Customers are 10 times more likely to interact with a video than with a block of text. Great content, in any form, can drive traffic to your website. So think about that, don’t just go on and on with text but include some images and videos. Just be careful you don’t go overboard with the images and videos because your site can become overwhelming and cluttered.
  4. Good content: Your clients visit your website to obtain important information. The content on your site should be informative and help them understand what you do and what you can do for them. It should also include relevant keywords that your customers might use to find you. Good content will keep your clients engaged on the page for longer. Content is as important as the overall design, so it’s necessary for you to provide your audience with valuable information.
  5. Call-to-action: Once you get your clients to your site, you want to guide them toward converting. The best way to do this is with your call-to-action. What is that? It could be a simple button, a banner, an ad or whatever that gets the user to interact with you and possibly make a purchase. The call-to-action should immediately catch the clients eye. By integrating this on your website, you’ll help drive better results on your page.
  6. Page speed: In my opinion an overlooked aspect of a website. You can have an awesome design, you can have great content, you can have a great call-to-action, but it won’t matter if your clients never get to se it. Page speed is an important element of web design. It ensures that you deliver that quality content to your clients as fast as possible. Nobody wants to wait for slow loading pages. I know I close them every time. If a page takes to long to load, your clients can quickly loose interest and go to a competitor’s page instead and just like that you lost a potential client. So pick a good hosting provider and be sure that your page performs as it should.
  7. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Your site design and content both need to be optimized for search engines like Google. Why? Because it’s the only way to show your page as quick as possible in the search results. It’s pretty important right? Let’s face it, did you ever look for something on the tenth page on google? Probably not. It’s more an act of desperation if you get to page ten without finding what you need 🙂 That is why SEO is VERY important. The quicker they find you, the more chance you have for them seeing your website and finally converting them to a buying client.

If you follow these guidelines, you should end up with a very good website.

Not a web developer? Feel free to contact me, and I can make the above mentioned things FOR YOU. Head on to my site and let’s talk about what you need.

This is the end of this article. Next time I’ll give some more pointers for achieving the above mentioned guidelines.

See you soon.

Marko