IS GOOD DESIGN A GOOD THING?

There is more to good website design than solely focusing on making it look good. The cold hard truth is that even a good-looking website that aced all the major design rules with surgical precision might be bad for business.

IS YOUR HOMEPAGE YOUR BEST PAGE?

First impressions count and if your homepage is the first thing your visitors see when they land on your site, then you better make it count in your favour.

Google Analytics reported that most visitors will decide if they want to keep scrolling or leave simply by looking at the main header image on a homepage. When it comes to your homepage, are you leveraging your main header image to keep the users from bouncing (aka – exiting our website)?

To keep visitors from clicking away from your site’s homepage, make sure your main header image has a ‘call to action’ and whatever you do, don’t simply say “Welcome to …”.

HAS YOUR WEBSITE MET YOUR BRAND?

A strong brand has one important advantage – recognition. With recognition comes familiarity. With familiarity comes trust and confidence. Done correctly, your brand helps build trust and loyalty that we all know transforms website visitors into paying customers.

To introduce your brand to your website, here are some three tips:

• Use only two different fonts on your site and make sure that at least one of the chosen fonts can be found on your logo.
• Use no more than four colours throughout your site that stem from your logo. This will ensure that you choose appropriate colours that represent your company to your website visitors.
• Use pictures that look and feel exactly the same. Let’s say you’re going for moody pictures on your website, putting a cheerful picture smack in the middle would be a faux pas. It would not only be disruptive but would also remove the continuity that builds trust.

Give your users a taste of your brand by weaving your brand throughout all the buttons, pages, posts.

DOES IT LOOK GOOD ON MOBILE?

So, you created your website and it looks great on your desktop but does it look and function well on smaller screens, like a mobile phone?

With more and more people visiting websites with their mobile phones, it would be reckless of you to ignore testing your website on smaller screens. An easy way to do this is to “Inspect” your website using a nifty little tool on Google Chrome. All you have to do is right-click somewhere on your website and choose “Inspect” from the top menu bar. Then you pick the device in the dropdown menu to switch between different screen size views.

In most cases, it’s not the good-looking website that converts but one that is designed with humans in mind. Strike a balance between looks and function, and take your website from mediocre to the best salesperson on your team. All in all, good web design is still good business but a well balanced one builds businesses.