5 Tips to Improve Your Website Design

Unsurprisingly, internet usage has rocketed during lockdowns. Customers need to be able to connect with your business online, and user experience needs to be at it’s best. I’ve compiled a few suggestions to enhance your brand online.

1. Keep it simple.

Users need to be able to discover exactly what your website offers within a matter of seconds. A clear visual hierarchy is a good starting point to help users view the most important elements first. A clean font at an easy size to read will help, and try to remove any unnecessary content that detracts from your message.

Any visual elements such as images and video will likely draw attention over most text, so it’s important to ensure they support your brand and reinforce your written content. Make sure they’re not too stocky and generic. Consider different styles too – 3D images and hand drawn, texture-based illustrations are predicted to be popular web design trends in 2021.

2. Be on brand.

Your company branding should be incorporated into every piece of business material you have (read more about this here), including your website. Your first stop should be consulting your brand guidelines. These will determine your colour palette, fonts, image styles, and how to use your company logo correctly.

If you find your website uses too many colours that don’t fit the rest of your marketing materials, try consulting your brand guidelines to find your correct colours. If you have too many illegible fonts, perhaps narrow down your choices to just one or two fonts to ensure your design is clean and clear.

3. Use clear call to actions.

Once users visit your website, you need to make it easy for them to navigate to areas which will result in increasing your conversion rates. Call to action buttons are a simple way of achieving this. A couple of common examples are add to cart and contact buttons.

The colour of your buttons is important here – research has found that orange buttons perform best, but ultimately it will depend on your brand colours. Aim to make the buttons a strong colour which contrast against your background colour.

4. Organise your navigation.

Navigation needs to be simple and obvious, so that users can land on your website and not have to think too hard about where to click next. It needs to display the core areas users can visit, and then show how they can easily explore areas of interest in more depth.

A few ideas to consider are using a fixed navigation bar near the top of your page, and including navigation in your website footer. Most importantly, keep the navigation bar consistent across all pages.

5. Optimise your website for mobile use.

Today more internet traffic comes from mobile use rather than desktop. This means it’s essential that your website provides the same great user experience when accessed on a mobile device as it does on desktop.

One design point to consider is making sure buttons are big enough for users to tap, and leave enough space between links to make sure each one can be easily clicked. Text should be large enough to read without the user having to zoom in, and try keeping any call to actions at the top of the screen so users can see them without having to scroll down.

Do you have any plans to update your website this year? If you’d like to ask how I could help with your website design, or even if you’d like to chat through your existing site, please get in touch at hello@hannahhowat.com.