If you have a website, it’s important that your web design is cutting-edge. Think of your website as like a shop window on the high street. We eat with our eyes first, so you may have the best product, or service offering, but people need to want to explore what you have to offer.

This is how we simplify the online/digital world to the offline/high street:

Your website homepage & logo = exterior and window of your shop
About page = your brand’s personality & staff members
Services = what you’re selling
Online store = shop floor layout

You wouldn’t want your retail store to look tatty, so why does that make your website any different? In five seconds of a user visiting your website, do they know what your company does? Can they navigate around the website easily? Are your products visible and accessible? These are the types of questions you should be asking yourself about your website; or if you’re thinking of creating one.

Here are some essential tips on how to improve your website design in 2021…

Usability

One of the most important aspects of website design is usability; how easy your site is to navigate around and use on multiple devices. If you have good usability on your website, it’s likely no one will even notice it. However, if you have poor usability, it’s going to stand out like a sore thumb. When it comes to websites, there are what we call “non-negotiables” and these are: your website must be accessible, have easy navigation and be mobile-friendly.

Can users locate all of the information that they need within 3-5 clicks? If not then your website may not be very user-friendly.

Here are some ways to test your website’s usability:

  • Use Google’s mobile-friendly test – this allows you to check if people can access your website on mobile devices.
  • Use Google Analytics – this allows you to check your website analytical data, and look at how much time users are spending on your website and their user journey.
  • Conduct a test – put yourself in your customer’s shoes; can you view the website on a mobile and purchase an item (on your website) without any problems?

Consistent Colours & Fonts

As we mentioned earlier, your homepage is the exterior of your shop. Your website will showcase your logo and offering; so people need to be able to know they are in the right place. One way to help your users recognise your brand is to have consistent colour and fonts. Try to be consistent with these across all your online platforms; such as your social media accounts, too.

Does your logo use a certain font? Use it for headings and pair it with a suitable paragraph font. (*You can find suitable fonts below)

What colours are being used for your logo? Use the colours in your logo as the main branding colours of your website. It sounds simple, but we often find people having 3 or 4 colours that don’t pair with their logo, and it making the website look unattractive to the end users.

Note – When it comes to picking fonts and colours, make sure you’re only picking a maximum of 3. Any more than this and you may find your logo is hard to remember and recognise, and your site may be super colourful, but not very usable.

*Suitable Fonts for your website:

Call-to-Actions (CTA’s)

When potential customers visit your website, you need to guide them; think of sign-posting on a walk. One way of doing that is using CTA’s, as they’re a great way to push people to pages where you want them to go. For example, you might have a newsletter sign-up you want to guide people to, or a telephone number to “call now”, or a location or lead form.

Where should you place a call-to-action (CTA)?

Some of the best areas to place CTA’s are actually within the top navigation. Do you have a specific landing page that you’d like to promote, such as a “Free Consultation”? Put the call to action within the top navigation in a button; you may find this leads to more click-throughs.

Another way to promote call-to-action is in areas such as the bottom of your website pages. Hopefully, you will have noticed our call to action, “Stay connected with us”, which promotes our social media channels.

Use White Space

A lot of people can be scared to use ‘white space’ on their website, as they want to cram as much information in to their page as possible. This can be counter-productive as users actually don’t want to scroll through loads of content in one big hit? If you’re not using white space on your web pages, users may feel that your website is too busy. This may lead to them leaving your website and you will lose potential customers. By incorporating white space in your website design, you will make your content more digestible.

Note – If you are looking to use white space on your website, be sure to check how it looks on other devices, such as your mobile. You may find that you need to decrease the white space for specific devices to decrease endless scrolling.

Optimise Page Speed

Optimising for page speed can be quite a large topic, but for any successful website design your website needs to load fast; under 5 seconds on both mobile and desktop.

So how can you optimise your website page speed?

  • Compress Imagery – Save your imagery as a JPG or use WebP files. There are plenty of tools such as TinyJPG which can help you compress your imagery
  • Optimise Code – This can be a difficult one if you’re not comfortable with HTML, Javascript or CSS. Optimising your code will make it display on one line, which makes it easier for browsers to download your webpages; resulting in faster load times.
  • Use Caching – If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, we highly recommend using a caching plugin, such as WP-Super-Cache or WP-Rocket. Caching helps your website load significantly faster.
  • Avoid Hosting Videos – We understand you may want to host your video,s but self-hosted videos can make your website slow. Most videos are around 10-15MB in size, which can take a long time for a user to download. This is why we recommend using YouTube or Vimeo; they will be using tools to load your videos faster.

Here is a comprehensive guide to page speed optimisation.

Test & Refine Your Website Design

Website design is always evolving and developing, and with different functionality all the time. It’s important to keep testing your website design and see what works for you and your users, and what doesn’t. Once you have found something that works, stick at it. However, remember, there is always room for improvement; or a makeover.

We always recommend to our clients to check out what the competition is doing. You may find something on their website that you like or is really helpful for users, that you would like to implement yourself.

If you need help with your website design, check out our services! We have a special £350 offer to bring your business online. *(Including co.uk domain and hosting)

Or feel free to email us at info@bluecheesedigital.com