Five Tips to Help Improve the Design of Your Website

If it’s been awhile since you last updated your website design, you’ve probably been eying your competitors’ sites (and realizing yours is in need of a bit of a refresh). Website design is ever-evolving, which means your website design can’t remain stagnant.

Don’t know where to start? Here are just a few ways you can enhance your website design and convert visitors into leads:

1. Use original photography

From a cost-savings perspective, stock photography is relatively cheap to purchase and easy to access. Therefore, many companies continue to use stock photography in their marketing collateral and on their websites. But because this stiff, unnatural business stock photography has been so prevalent online, your website visitors can easily spot these photos as generic. Instead, consider staging photo shoots at your workplace to reflect your company’s authentic brand, or off campus to get just the shots you need.

2. Create fonts that are easy to read on all devices

While web designers and marketers alike have debated on best practices for website copy fonts (such as sans serif versus serif), most studies show that sans serif is easier to read and comprehend online. Recent design trends seem to be shifting to the use of sans serif for headlines and serif for large amounts of text. You should use larger fonts when at all possible, so that text can be easily read via mobile devices.

3. Simplify your website design

Web design trends are quickly moving away from the busy, cluttered look (think: Multiple click-through buttons, copy and ads) and gravitating toward clean lines and white space. These trends favor trimmed down, carefully selected language and powerful photos. Another way to simplify your website and achieve a de-cluttered feel is to lower your overall page count (and make existing pages stronger).

4. Design every page as a landing page

This is probably the most important design tip when refreshing a website. Every marketer and business owner tries to keep up on SEO and website traffic flow, but the reality is that you can’t always predict where your traffic will be coming from. So, you should design every page as if it’s a branded landing page with calls to action, contact information and relevant links. For example, if you have a blog post mentioning a relevant product or service that drives traffic to your page, you’ll want to direct the traffic towards a product you offer on a sidebar with contact information.

5. Keep the most important information above the fold

You should always be mindful of your website fold, which is basically the information that visitors can view on their screen before having to scroll down. Sometimes this is the first and only thing website visitors see about your product (if your visitor doesn’t scroll down before navigating away). Include the most important or relevant information above your website fold to make them easier to find for visitors, such as your call to action, product list and contact info.

If you’d like more tips on how to refresh your website design, or you’d like a comprehensive website review, contact the knowledgeable web design team at SKYFALL BLUE.