The heart of the online presence for any business in the UK is its website. It’s the first experience on a company’s websites that could generate new leads and paying customers for that business, and so the design of their website will play an integral part in shaping that first impression.
The last thing you want to do when designing someone else’s website is to scare visitors away because the website design is chaotic and doesn’t function as well as that company’s competitors.
If you want to gain a positive reputation for being an excellent professional website designer, then you’ll need to build websites that entice and engage new users, one that makes them want to return time and time again and a site that encourages leads/sales. This will ensure the ROI is good for the company you are designing for and will help then get more converting site visitors which could, in turn, grow their business.
Web Design Tips
Here are just a few of the aspects of website design that professionals should already be practising and implementing in their services and details on how you can improve those skills if they are lagging.
Make Sure The Web Design Reflects The Business
A company’s website is an extension of their brand, so as their website designer, you should first and foremost represent the brands’ image back into the design of their website. It is essential that designers choose designs that fit the brand of the business they’re working for or work with the business to create better branding if you feel that it is outdated. The site’s branding should be easily remembered by visitors to the site, and this is the message that should also be portrayed to your customer.
The type of company you are designing a website decides the design concept for the site. you can’t use the same web design style for a graphic designer and a Dr’s surgery in the next village, it’s not that simple. You have to learn which styles of site design work with which companies.
Overall, you want to choose colours and designs that make the brand speak to your target audience. This will help you develop the brands’ image and will establish a sense of connection with your business.
By going for a simple yet sleek web design that represents the brand you’re designing for should be enough to keep people on the site for longer because they’ll have a great first impression and will want to stay on the site. Overcrowded designs often lead to site visitors leaving and heading over to competitors. Sometimes less is more and that’s all you need to remember.
How To Create A Simple But Modern Homepage?
People usually head to a businesses homepage to learn more about them. This means that the company’s homepage is a vital component of the entire website design.
It is critical that you design an easy but efficient homepage. You don’t want to overload the site visitor with too much information, and you don’t want to overwhelm them either. If the homepage is too busy then you may discourage visitors from clicking further into the site – this will in turn negatively affect lead generation so as the designer it’s up to you to find the right balance between design and content to encourage visitor use of the site.
Elements that concern your clients’ audience should be included on their homepage. Rather than a block of text, you’ll want to concentrate more on visual elements. Visual elements sustain the engagement of site guests and inspire them to learn more and to continue browsing the site, which in turn decreases the website bounce rate.
You can create visual elements, instead of blocks of text, that connect to pages with more details. It encourages readers to see various aspects of an organisation and allows them to determine what to look at next.
Only provide essential details on it to construct a productive homepage. This will prevent the website from being too cluttered and make it easier to browse the sites pages.
You can keep site visitors engaging with your homepage longer by building a simple but effective homepage.
Simple WordPress Themes You Could Use:
Adios
Uncode
Create Functional Site Navigation
One of the most significant parts of a website is the navigation. Site visitors will use the navigation when they want to find out more information and different pages and topics covered on the website. You need those people to be able to find the right pages and exactly what they are looking for without too much hassle and hard work.
You need to ensure that it is quick and easy to use when you build the navigation. You want to build broad headings with unique subheadings that can be used. This will help you keep the website organised as well as help find information for the site visitors.
Users won’t find details if they have poor navigation options. They’re going to fail to find the correct pages. This will encourage them to abandon the site (that you designed) and select the site of a rival company.
Build a functional navigation that helps them locate the correct data to keep leads engaged and present on your website longer.
Ensure It’s A Responsive Website Design
A responsive layout is the only layout you should be using for professional web design. Responsive web design is extremely important since it impacts the way your clients’ website can be viewed on different devices.
A responsive design will adapt to any device, and as mobile search increases, the ability for a website design to adapt to all devices in existence ensures a website can be viewed by anyone on any device.
Users will fail to use the site if its website looks like the desktop version on every device. The words and links will be too tiny, and too small to see everything, users would need to zoom in, and it would be very inconvenient to use. If it is designed like the desktop website design, they can’t view your page in its entirety on a mobile phone.
For your website, this form of design is important because it allows smartphone and tablet users to better view the website. Responsive site designs ensure users have a smooth experience that helps them to enjoy the time spent on your site regardless of the device they use, and the site will hold leads for much longer too.
You can capture more leads and keep them connected with the website of the organisation you’re building the site for by implementing a responsive website design.
Make Your Clients Site Easy To Skim
In order to find details, many leads will skim through the website. They are on there searching for a specific piece of data, and they can quickly look through the web to find it. For smartphone devices, this is particularly true. If they can’t find what they’re looking for – quickly – they will likely click off the site and go on to one of your competitor’s sites instead.
You’ll need to build a template that allows the user to skim through the pages of the website quickly. It is important that they find the information they’re looking for in good time. To make it easy for their audience to skim through the page, you should design every single website you make with this in mind.
You need to make the website easy to read in order to provide the user with a positive experience.
Best Practices For Professionals
As you build your website, here are some of the best practices you can follow:
Add Content in Small Paragraphs – When the paragraphs are short, users can click through and pick out data more easily.
To make essential data, stand out, use graphics – this will catch their attention and allow them to quickly display the data.
Choose a font that is simple to read – your readers will struggle to read the details on your site if you use an intricate font.
There are only a few ways you can make it easier to skim on your website. By having an easy-to-skim website, you will be able to have the most valuable details for leads that can help the company convert more sales which makes you look like a G.
Include Visual Elements
A significant part of your website design is the visual elements that you add to the site. You don’t want to bog down the site with a ton of text on your blog. This can deter leads, and so you need to make sure each of the blogs you add on to the site has a fair amount of images to text.
You’ll capture the attention of the site visitors by including visual elements such as images, videos, and infographics, so they take the time to look at visual elements. It’s a smart way to break up texts and keep your page engaged in them.
A video, which can have a massive influence on a website’s audience, is one of the best elements to include on your website. Consumers are currently ten times more likely to engage with a video than with text.
This engagement with the videos means the website is engaged in holding leads. The company will get more conversions because leads remain engaged — one of our top design tips would be to use visual elements for your website design to earn more leads and conversions for the company you’re working on the design for.
Always Incorporate Social Media Buttons On The Site
A perfect way to help people communicate with a brand or business is for them to be able to communicate effectively by social media. It’s also a really effective way for a company to manage its reputation better online.
What Are The Most Effective Social Media Platforms?
It’s definitely a good website design tip to add social media buttons on to each website you design. It’s a fast way to link customers and the general public straight to the web pages too – especially if the company’s leads are on social media. If the site visitors are on social media, they may want to seek it out and follow it or browse through it to see what other people are saying.
Social networking allows a company to establish a direct link with leads, so it is important that you add these buttons to your website designs as your own customers will benefit.
Another great way to communicate with your own clients and to get more clients for your website design company would be to also build a bigger presence on social media. There are many groups on sites like Facebook and hashtags that you can target for words and phrases like #professionalwebdesign #professionalwebdesigncompany #websitedesignersnearme – This is a sure-fire way to attract new clients for your web design services.
Where To Get The Best Social Media Icons From?
To make your web design a more custom affair, you should kit out each of your site designs out with their own custom social media badges and icons. You can make sure they fit with the company’s brand and fit in to ensure a good website design.
Here’s a few examples and where you can purchase sets for your professional design:
Hand Drawn Social Media Icons From Creative Market
Neon Social Media Icons
2020 Clean And Simple Social Icon Designs
Include Calls To Action (CTA)
The error of omitting calls to action (CTA) on website designs is frequently made. This is one of the most critical aspects of a company’s online platform, as it encourages users to take action, so it must be done well.
In reality, when users visit a website, and they like the design and information they see, they’ll look for what they can do next like making contact, hitting the buy now button and checking out or even typing a query into the websites internal search engine. A site visitor can be directed to the next stage of their site visit if you as the designer provide them with the prompts they need in order to be pushed towards conversion (lead, sale, contact, end result).
Always Test The Sites Pages
It is important to test all of the pages on your website – especially when you think the site is ready to go live or show your client. Test all of your plugins, internal linking, SEO, metadata, ALT tags and every aspect of the design of your site.
Over the first few weeks, keep a check on the design and fix any features you think could be improved upon reflection.
It’s important that the website is working to near perfection before presenting the final copy of it to your customer.
We hope you found this article useful and we hope it helps with your professional website design service and has given you some additional web design tips that may have slipped your mind. You can take a refresher course in website design on sites like the open university and skillshare. Youtube is also full of website design tips videos to show you what good web design should look like.