Website design is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Your website is one of the top ways to gain more clients and exposure. However, just having a website is not enough to get the kind of business that you want.
So, what should you focus on when designing your website? Here, we’ve laid out the top 10 most important website design elements for you to keep in mind when designing your website. 
Site Navigation
Your website should be easy to navigate and the menu should be accessible from every page. Your audience is coming to your page for information, and that information shouldn’t be hidden from them or hard to find.
If your website has poor navigation, your audience is less likely to engage with your site and your business. Unfortunately, a lot of website menus can be quite annoying. You’ll want your menu to be present and readily accessible for the audience, but you don’t want to annoy them with it flying in and out or not being able to click what they need because it disappears. Functionality should be key here.
Simple site navigation is the way to go. Headers and sub-headers will help your audience find the information that they need quickly and easily. Helping your audience and potential customers is important when running a business, and having easy navigation on your website is the best way to do that.
Responsive Design
With the growth of technology, we now have some amazing devices at our disposal. This is great for accessing information but unfortunatley your business must now have a website that works across all devices. Making a great website for desktop is a good start, but you’ll also need to be make sure you spend time making your mobile website look good too.
Your audience has the ability to access your site from computers, tablets, and cell phones. In order to make sure they stay on your website, you’ll need to have a clean and consistent look across all devices.
Responsive design is important to keep in mind when designing your website to ensure that your audience is pleased with their experience with your site regardless of device. If you want to have a professional, and successful, website you will need to take time in incorporating responsive design. 
Visuals and Style
Professionalism is a major factor for your companies website. This will help you keep the consistency of your brand. It’s important for you to create a style guide for your brand to keep this consistency.
In this style guide, you will need to make sure you decide on color, format, and typography. This will make it easy for other people to work on your website while staying within your brand. They will be able to reference your style guide and use all the elements that you’ve chosen while adding new elements to your website.
When you’re upgrading your website you should look into adding aspects that your audience can interact with. Visual elements are great to get interaction from your audience. This is because people are more likely to engage with visual content than text content.
The only downside to visual content is that some businesses and brands will go overboard with photos and videos. This will disengage your audience which is not at all what you want to do. A good rule of thumb is to keep equal parts text and visuals on your website. You do not want to have a whole page that is solely visuals or text. You want the two to complement each other while providing interaction and keeping in line with your style guide.
Content
This is the structure of your website, and shouldn’t be ignored in favor of visuals. As previously discussed, visuals and text need to go hand-in-hand with each other. The visuals on your website are nothing without content.
Content is the real meat and potatoes of your website. Visitors of your website are looking to figure out what exactly your company does. If your don’t have any content, or if it’s poor, people will leave your website and you’ll miss out on potential leads.
The text that you put on your website should provide information to your audience, good readability, and short. Your audience is coming to your website to learn more about your company. If the content on your website doesn’t provide them with information on what you do, then they will leave and go to a competitors site. Great content on your website will also help your search engine optimization (SEO), which will help you be found online easier. 
Web Friendly
By this point, your website should be pretty, easy to use, and have great informative content. However, none of this matters if you aren’t paying attention to your search engine optimization (SEO) while designing your new website.
As previously discussed, good informative content on your site can help your SEO. This means that you will show up higher on search engine sites like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This is mainly through the use of keywords.
Keywords are important, but you can’t just use any old words. You’ll need to do some SEO research and see which words in your specific industry are being searched the most by potential customers. Once you find these words, you’ll need to integrate them into your website content. You should be using words that are too technical, as this can take away from your SEO.
Navigation are also important for SEO as well. With better navigation, your visitors are more likely to spend more time on your site. They’re also more likely to visit your site multiple times. This helps your SEO because they can see that you are relevant to certain searches and people are interested in your website.
Visuals are also needed to help with your SEO. You will need to pick good pictures and then make sure that you optimize and compress them that they load faster for your visitors. Slow load times will cause people to leave your website and go to another. This hurts your SEO, so you’ll want to make sure your visuals have good load times to keep people coming back to your site.
Good web design will entice your audience to come back to your site over and over again. This boosts your SEO and the higher your SEO, the more website visitors you will have, which can also lead to potential customers and leads.
Interaction and Call-to-Action
Interaction is a great way to keep people on your site. A great way to do this, along with visuals, is to add call-to-action buttons. This will help convert all your visitors from leads into customers.
One major factor to keep in mind is that these buttons need to draw in your audience’s attention. They shouldn’t deviate too much from your style guide because that will break with consistency, but if they get lost among the content and visuals, they will never be clicked. Using a bright color that stands out from the rest of your color scheme (but still goes with it) is perfect for this.
Your website should also include easy to find contact information. While your website may do a great job of showcasing all the different products and services you may offer, your audience may still have further questions. Adding in a contact page is great so your audience has different options for reaching out. This will help you gain more leads and potential customers. 
Page Speed
This one may seem a bit out of left field, but no matter how good your website looks, it’ll all be for nothing if your audience can’t even get to it. This is one of the most important aspects of web design because it makes sure that your audience is able to get the information that they’re looking for quickly.
In this day and age, everyone wants the internet to work quickly, no matter what they’re doing. Any time that they have to wait for any site or app to load, they lose interest. They’ll leave your site and go somewhere else with faster load times to get their desired information. Which means, you’re giving your competition more business.
You are able to check your page speed with a quick Google search. Unfortunately, you will have to make updates to your website yourself to upgrade the page speed. Another option would be to hire a digital marketing company to do this for you. This is a great option because they will be able to focus on this for you while you focus on running your business!
Branding
Branding is a big part of any business. If you don’t have a unique brand, you won’t be remembered. Think about it, so many companies can be recognized just from their logo, like McDonald’s, Nike, and Adidas to name a few. Your business needs to have its own brand to be recognizable.
Now, what does this have to do with web design? Well, your website is an extension of your brand. As mentioned before, a style guide is used to help keep consisntency across the entire website. This guide can be based off of your brand. What colors did you pick in your logo? What font did you choose to use in your logo? Use those on your website.
Your website is a marketing tool. You need to be found in order to get more business, and what better way to get business than online. People will be looking you up online before they call you, email you, or visit your office about buying your product/service.
Websites are a great way to present your brand and get new leads. Unfortunately, if the site doesn’t run well or look well, you’ll be losing potential customers. Putting time and effort into making a great website is vital for your business.
Need website design help? J&R Marketing specializes in creating amazing websites for all businesses. Contact us now so we can help you build the website of your dreams!
