When starting a website project, you may already know what the site is for and how you want it to look. You have thought about all the content you want to share on the site. You may have all of this on stand by and ready to get going. But have you considered some of the key design tips to make sure your website is successful?
Here are just a handful of tricks to ensure you are making the most of your website.
1. Make it responsive
When creating a site, you tend to only look at it on a desktop. This makes it easy to forget that the majority of people actually use mobile devices to browse the internet. A recent study showed that globally, 68.1% of all website visits in 2020 came from mobile devices. While 3.1% of visitors came from tablets, they are something that we cannot forget about.
So creating a site that is accessible for everyone is extremely important. Don’t forget to check this when designing, building and signing off your website.
2. Bold CTA’s that have a purpose
With every new website project I start, I always ask, “what do you want to achieve from building this site?”
This is quite a provoking questions because quite often, my clients are unsure. Is it to get more bookings, to get people to sign up to their newsletter, for people to purchase their products? Or is it just to grow a digital presence? These are all common and valid responses.
Once the key aim of the site has been defined, you can then ensure that you have CTA’s (Call To Actions) across your site that help achieve them. Whether that’s a button linking to your shop, an email form, or a phone number to ring. Without call to actions, you cannot ask your users to do what you want them to do.
3. Consistent branding
Both on and off your website, you need to make sure that you have a clear brand. This will help you grow a presence within your industry for your customers. This includes colours, typography, imagery and logo to name a few. This is classified as your brand guidelines. If you haven’t got any yet, you may find it useful to make a document with a set of “brand guides” to help with any future asset creation. Whether that’s a leaflet, poster, sign etc.
When it comes to your website, you should do the same – making sure every page has the same brand guides and looks unified. Not only will this make your site look more professional, it will help users recognise your brand in the future.
4. Loading speed
Something you may have not even thought about if you haven’t started designing or building your site. Depending on the size and quantity of large media items, your website loading speed could be affected. In short, a long page loading time results in people coming off of your site and going to the next best thing. In the digital age where anything that takes longer than 3 seconds to load is considered slow, we have to create fast sites.
There are lots of ways to make your website load faster, which I will go into in a future blog post. The top website loading tips I can give for now are:
- Resize images before you upload – Sizing them perfectly for how they are going to be used means you wont have lots of massive images. A full screen background image usually needs to be 2000 px wide, so a high resolution image that’s 8000 px wide can be reduced and save you so much space and in turn, speed.
- If you don’t need it, delete it – Delete media items for your site you are no longer using. Even though they’re not being displayed, they are being stored on your site and slowing it down.
- Purge your plugins – When creating a site you may trial and error a few plugins. Be sure to review them every now and again and delete the ones you no longer need.
If you need assistance with these website tips or are interested in a new website project, book in your FREE 30-minute consultation so we can chat. Why not take a look at my website packages here?
