Your website is a direct reflection of your business. The people who visit your site will judge your business by it. Approximately 46% of consumers report that they determine their view of credibility of a company by its website design. Your digital marketing efforts have to begin and end with your website design. Here are some ways to make your website do more for you and your bottom line.
- Your site needs to load very quickly. We live in the age of Twitter. People only give a website between three and four seconds before they give up on it and go someplace else. You need to work with your web design team to make sure you have a great site that loads almost immediately. A great site that takes a long time to load is useless, say digital marketing companies.
- Make it look great on mobile. A few years ago, the number of people who access the internet via a mobile device surpassed the number of people who access it through computers. If you run a local business, such as a restaurant, this is even more important. When people are out and about, they look for local businesses, they do it on their mobile devices. You can either gain customers or lose out on opportunities depending on how well they can access your website from their mobile device. You will miss out on a lot of sales if you do not pay attention to mobile devices when working on your web design.
- Less is more. There was a time when digital marketing efforts included putting as much content and as many images on a website as possible. Those days are gone. Now, websites that are packed with everything but the kitchen sink look cluttered and busy. An elegant and simple web design will get you more sales than one that is just too much to look at. You should have only one call to action per page. Eliminate the extraneous stuff and you will have visitors who spend more time on your website and come back more often.
- Make your site easy to navigate. Most websites today have a primary menu bar that is placed horizontally along the top of the page. That is called your “primary navigation.” Next, the “secondary” navigation is either placed directly under the primary navigation or in the left or right sidebar. If you do that, you will help your customers use your site. Because this is where visitors’ eyes naturally want to go, using this kind of navigation is called “intuitive.” Use this kind of navigation and your site will be more useful to the people who visit it.
- White space is your friend. While your background may not be white, the blank space is referred to as “white space.” This goes back to the concept of simplicity. You need to put some space around your text and images. Each section should have its own space. That just makes your site easier on the eye. That is a good thing. You do not want to give your visitors a headache when they come to your site.
- Be careful with your fonts. Digital marketing company experts say that sans-serif fonts such as Arial are better than curly or fancy looking fonts for the majority of your text. It is find to use fun or different fonts in places around your site for emphasis but if people who visit your site have a hard time reading it, a lot of your business will be lost. That will make all that great copy you have written be completely useless. Make sure it is big enough to be read by everyone who may come to your site.
- Be just as careful with your color choices. Make them contrast with each other but they do not need to be blinding. Use only a few colors. Sites that have colors jumping off of the screen look very amateurish. That is the last thing you need. In keeping with the theme that less is more, you should apply that to your color schemes.
Your website is integral to growing your brand and helping you spread the word about what you do and provide.
