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10 Tips to Improve Your Website Design

admin : January 18, 2021

Websites

The look and feel of your website matters. It takes 0.05 seconds for users to make a first impression of your website. It’s essential that you capture user interest from the start.

Website design isn’t just about the aesthetics – it also involves usability. To help you out, we’ve put together 10 tips to perfect your website design and get more clients in the long run.

1. Create a style guide

Your website design should stay consistent. A best practice is to create a style guide for your site, defining the color scheme, logo, fonts, images, buttons and page layouts. By doing this, you’ll avoid any jarring design decisions by you or your co-workers.

2. Get personal

Your content and images should be as personalized as possible. In particular, your content should follow a style and tone that’s brand-specific. Avoid generalizing your style – personalize it to your company. This also goes for your images. Stock images are ok, but make sure they fit into your overall brand style.

3. Boost site speed

Site speed is a must-have for any website. Clean up your site by following best practices including compressing your images, avoiding animations, reducing plugins, contracting high-quality hosting and reducing redirects. This will keep your site quick and nimble.

4. Refine your navigation via heatmap

Your navigation bar and menu should get users to where they want to go. It should also be thumb-friendly for mobile. Add a heatmap plugin (such as HotJar or CrazyEgg) and take a look to see where users are clicking. This will help you determine what areas you need to highlight and how to better redistribute design elements.

5. Integrate testimonials across your pages

Testimonial-specific pages are usually unpopular. Instead, you should integrate testimonials across your other pages so that users can view them while browsing. Video testimonials are especially powerful and easy to include as sidebars on your pages.

6. Don’t fear white space

There’s nothing wrong with white space. In fact, it’s an important design element to highlight and buffer parts of your webpages. Avoid cluttering your pages and instead use white space to strike a design balance.

7. Include an FAQ page

If you’re receiving lots of messages and calls about the same questions, it’s a best practice to write up an FAQ page. It will save you and your users time. It’s also a great resource to keep updating over time.

8. Ensure mobile looks excellent

Everybody’s always talking about mobile responsive sites. However, it’s not enough to have the functionality. You should make sure that mobile actually looks as good as or better than desktop. You may need to revise certain elements so they appear nicely on mobile.

9. Incorporate a chatbot

Chatbots are the future of customer service. Having a chatbot appear on your website is a great way to handle user needs. It should also follow your website design so that it doesn’t look out of place.

10. Review your site regularly

The most important aspect of website design is that you’re constantly reviewing and updating it. Set up a monthly calendar reminder to review your site for design elements. This will help you resolve any issues with your design and also improve details over time.

73% of American companies use website design to stand out from the competition. You should too. Improve your website design with our 10 tips and start capturing users, old and new.

If you require help with any of these design elements, reach out to the Onsharp team. We can give you a personalized design consultation.