A website is much more than a digital storefront. It can make or break your business. We see room for website optimizations daily here. We've compiled this list of 10 features of an optimized website every business owner should pay attention to when it comes to their website.
Even on sites that otherwise look great and perform well, there's usually room for improvement. These aspects of web design make for a great starting point if you're looking to improve the way your website looks and how it functions.
1. Aesthetically Pleasing
The first step in turning your website into a lead-generation machine is somewhat obvious. Make it look good. Nobody enjoys looking at a website that's designed poorly with misaligned, unsymmetrical, hot garbage on it. Blurry pictures, crooked text, bad margins, ugly fonts, the list goes on and on.
The mind is a fickle beast, and aesthetics are engrained into our DNA. We only enjoy looking at things we enjoy looking at. If you want your website visitors to spend quality time browsing your website, they need to enjoy looking at it, so make sure you spend as much time as you need on the cosmetic aspects of your site.
Make sure the text is nice and legible, both from a size and color standpoint. Contrast light and dark elements. Especially when it comes to your call-to-action buttons. Select photos that not only look good, but tell a story. Imagine every square inch of your website is prime real estate, and try to make every headline, description, image, and section, serve a purpose.
2. A Click-to-Call Phone Number in the Header
Assuming of course, you want phone calls. Some businesses don't, but most businesses do. Is your phone number buried in the footer? Is the only way your website visitor can call your business by clicking on Contact Us? And if you've placed your phone number in a prominent place (nice work...) is it a link? Can a user call you by clicking on your number, or do they have to punch it in manually?
The easier you can make it for your site visitors to perform certain actions, the more often they'll happen. Sounds like a no brainer, but we see inefficiencies pertaining to website phone numbers, every, single, day.
If calls are an important type of lead for your business, following the best practices listed here will absolutely help increase the likelihood of someone calling you after discovering your business online and visiting your site.
3. Responsive Design
There are dozens of screen resolutions out there. Just because your website looks good at one resolution, doesn't mean it won't be broken on others.
This is where responsive website design comes into play. If designed correctly, your website will be fully legible and functional across all or most resolutions, whether your visitor is using a more modern screen resolution like 1080P, or is on an older or smaller device whose screen has fewer pixels.
A responsive website checker tool can help you simulate multiple resolutions on your screen, so that you can double check what your site looks like at 720P or other, smaller screen resolutions.
If you find that your elements are overlapping, or certain pictures or paragraphs are falling off the screen, this is a good indicator that you need to tweak your site's layout and ensure its design is more responsive.
4. Mobile-Friendly
Even more important than responsive website design, is a site that's mobile-friendly. More than half of all web traffic these days comes from cell phones, so your website needs to look just as good if not better on mobile devices.
If your website isn't designed with mobile in mind, the text can sometimes appear so small, you'd need a Hubble Space Telescope to read the text. Assuming your site isn't completely broken altogether on mobile.
Whether you're designing your site on your own or working with a professional web designer, it's important to remember to check your new site's appearance on mobile devices to ensure it looks good to those 55-75% of website visitors that will be coming to you from their cell phones.
One example of bad mobile design is links, buttons, and other clickable elements that are too close to one another. A thumb is pretty fat compared to a phone screen, so it's important to space things out far enough that people can actually click on them without accidently clicking the wrong things.
Eventually, they'll grow frustrated with your site and take their business elsewhere if these design issues aren't corrected.
5. Great Copy
People go to websites looking for information that solves their problems and fulfills their needs. It's important to make sure that regardless of what product or service your business offers, your site's verbiage is conveyed in a way that's brief, concise, and helps your users determine whether or not your company is a good fit for them.
Too little text is bad. Too much text gets wordy and doesn't mesh well with modern day attention spans. 600-1000 words per page is just right. Not only for your visitors, but for search engines as well.
They too analyze your site to see how its written content stacks up. If you need to hire a pro to write the copy for your site, that's okay, because it just might be money well spent.
6. Proper Calls-to-Action
Assuming your website visitor likes what they're seeing and what they're reading, they'll want to perform an action. It could be placing a phone call, sending an email, making a purchase, scheduling an appointment, signing up for more information, or another action.
But they won't be able to or won't want to if they can't quickly and efficiently find the right button on your site to perform that action. This element of website design is known as conversion rate optimization and is a form of digital marketing in and of itself. Website design for conversion rate optimization ensures that all aspects of your website that are responsible for generating leads, calls, and sales, are optimized to help produce maximum results.
Your call-to-action prompts need to be clear as to what their purpose is, well-placed, and bright enough to catch your user's eye. On the other hand, too many buttons can feel obnoxious. Like your website is a pushy used car salesman.
So try to strike a nice balance between multiple conversion options for your users without overdoing it. As with most aspects of good web design and life in general, moderation is key.
7. Thorough Metadata
Search engines like Google and Bing have their own ways of determining a website's quality. They take dozens of factors into consideration when evaluating your site, but one of the key elements they look at is your site's metadata.
Metadata is the part of your website no one sees. The behind the scenes. Metadata can and will, however, show up on search engines. Not only will search engines critique it, but users will see it on the search engine results page, and this will influence whether or not they choose to click on your website.
8. Quick Site Speed
Again, beneficial for both your visitors as well as search engines. The faster it loads, the better. End of story.
The section below about cropped and compressed images is part of site speed, but aside from that, you want to do everything within your power to make your website load as quickly as possible on desktop and especially on mobile, since mobile sites tend to be a bit harder to optimize.
Running lean is a good general rule of thumb here. Plug-ins, widgets, and chat boxes require a lot of code to render and bog your site down pretty significantly, so make sure these extra, data-intensive bells and whistles on your site are worth the sacrifice in speed before installing them.
9. Cropped and Compressed Images
The extra kilobytes really start to add up when considering your site has dozens, maybe hundreds of images across its entirety.
Make sure the images on your site are only as big and as clear as you need them to be, and don't use too many.
10. Efficient Navigation
Confusing website navigation is another thing that can negatively impact how long users stay on your site and how many pages they read or look at. To optimize this, ensure your website's menu and sub-menus are well organized and self-explanatory.
These 10 aspects of website optimization aren't a complete list, but they sure as heck make for a great starting point. If you can do a good job of ensuring these elements of your site are in-line, you're already ahead of many others that have dropped the ball, giving you that much more of a competitive edge.
Maybe your website is older. Or, you simply have so many objectives to tackle each day that tinkering with your website doesn't really sound feasible.
There are plenty of professional website designers out there that can help you with this. If you seek out a pro's help for your business's website, keep this checklist handy, and make sure you ask about bullet points like these, because a lot of services won't include many of these web design features, either because they cost extra or because your "professional web designer" is relatively clueless, so be sure to ask your prospective designer how they plan to address these components of modern website design.
At Array Marketing Solutions, our website design services include everything we've talked about here today. A one-stop solution that will ensure your site looks good, works right, adjusts to different screen sizes, loads fast, and contains appropriate metadata, too.
Some businesses only need a simple site to establish a web presence with, while other businesses need layered, complex sites to help them carry out their business goals in the digital space, and this is why website design costs can vary so greatly.
But if you're curious how much a new website would cost for your business specifically, please feel free to drop us a line. We'll be happy to schedule a brief conversation with you so that we can assess what your needs are and offer you a free web design quote.
Simply call us, email us, or schedule a free consultation using our online booking page, and we'll be happy to chat.
A website, if designed properly, can do a whole lot more for you than sit around on the internet and look pretty. It can act as an assembly line for productivity and revenue. We hope these web design tips have made a light bulb or two go off in your head, and your business's future will hopefully be all the better for it.
Cheers,
-AS
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