Web design is more complex than you might think. The importance of a good sales funnel and a well-designed customer journey has been well known to marketers since before the internet was even a thing, so it’s only natural that these concepts have found their place on the web as well.

A visitor on your website needs to go through an entire sales pitch before they invest in your product, and the essence of small business web design relies upon a developer’s ability to integrate that pitch into a seamless, easily navigable experience to be delivered through a web browser.

Let’s look at some of the fundamental components that go into successful web design and see how they empower businesses and generate leads. The process begins well before your potential visitor gets there, which brings us to our first question.

How do I get visitors to my site? | SEO and Page Optimization

In May 2020, Google announced that they would begin to consider page experience signals in the running for Google Search rankings. This means that, in the near future, search results and rankings would be informed by the quality of experience delivered to users of a website as a whole, and not just by the quality of content contained within it.

Search engines want to guide users to the best, most fruitful experiences they can have according to their search results. To improve the experience of your site, a good place to start would be Google Lighthouse and Page Speed Insights. These will give you an idea of what you can do to speed up the experience of your website, such as minifying scripts and compressing your images.

Once you’ve optimized your experience, it’s time to focus on your content. Building content according to search considerations is key, and integrating search keywords into your text without letting it seem forced helps you capitalize on all that time you spent improving load times.

Optimization is an ongoing process, you’ll be optimizing your site for as long as it keeps growing and trying to reach greater audiences. Even when you’ve only started to fix things up, you should start to see a steadily growing stream of visitors on your site. But generating traffic and capitalizing on it are two different things. This brings us to our next question.

How do I build a connection with my audience? | Welcoming and nurturing potential leads

You’ll be hard-pressed to sell anything if you just start bombarding your visitors with your products as soon as they got to your site. You’d still cater to people looking for specifically what you’re selling, but that’ll only be a small part of your entire visitor population. Your homepage needs to appeal to people who might be interested in your product in the future as well, lest they move away from your website before you make an impression, and most likely lose their business for good.

Good web design varies very greatly depending on its purpose, so it’s difficult to generalize tips for making a good site. However, the following are key for any site in any domain.

A clear value proposition, and helpful content to go around it

You should know what you’re selling, and why everyone needs it. For technical products, it’s good to stick to your niche and present yourself as an authority, while products that have a community aspect to them can thrive from having the positive traits of that community highlighted. Be honest and confident with your use of language, and don’t hesitate to weave a story if your product or service allows for it. Remember, there’s people sitting on the receiving end of your site; and sometimes nothing works quite as well as just an honest, human appeal. And regardless of what your product is, it can probably benefit from having some personality behind it.

Efficient, cohesive web design

You don’t want your design elements to clash with one another or overwhelm each other (no brightly colored text on similarly colored backgrounds). Making sure your content is readable and aesthetically pleasant leaves more room for your visitor to engage with your site, and for them to enjoy doing so.

Making it easy to explore

The last thing you want is to generate an interest in a topic or question, only to have your visitor navigate to another site to answer that question or explore the topic. This is why you want all the information in your site to link together, and link together well. You want all the information there, to be sure, but you also want the information to be broken down into easily digestible chunks, so that your visitors can have a pleasant journey browsing through page after page.

If you think your web design needs improvement or a total redesign, contact us today!