Top 8 Elements You Must Have in Your Website Design

We’ve all been there. You log onto a website to find an answer to a question, purchase a specific product, learn something, or browse, and your goals are stymied by bad website design. You click around aimlessly, trying to find the thing you went there for in the first place, only to end up frustrated and ultimately closing that tab on your browser and searching elsewhere.

Don’t let your website be that website.

Instead, make sure that your business has a website that can function as one of the most important places your customers visit to learn about you and even make a purchase. To do that, you’ll want to make sure you have these eight things optimized:

1. Creative Design

While this should feel obvious, we’re experienced enough to know it isn’t. The good news is, we’re also experienced in fixing this problem. Your website needs to fit in with your industry. Your colors need to attract, not deter, customers. Your design needs to be intuitive and clean. The days of jampacking a Geocities site (RIP) with your favorite tunes, crazy colors, and badly edited photos are over. Make sure your digital design suits your brand.

2. Content

Just second to visual design is content. The copy on your website needs to share the right amount of information to ensure your customers are informed, without overwhelming them with way too much detail. It needs to tell your story, but it shouldn’t be so personal that people wonder if it’s your personal diary.

As an added benefit, don’t be shy when it comes to SEO. SEO can help you get customers by answering the right questions and providing the right content.

3. Utilize Your Navigation

Your navigation bar should prioritize the most important pages on your site. For example, if you run a promotion during the summer, it would be better to have a Promo page in your navigation, as opposed to having 20 promotion landing pages listed in your navigation. Utilize your navigation to highlight the most important places on your site for your customers to visit.

4. Make Your Website Accessible

There are different levels of accessibility, and at the bare minimum, you should ensure that your website can be easily read by screen readers in order to educate customers with special needs. This means proper alt tags, H1s and H2s, etc. This leads us to our next point…

5. Code Your Website Properly

If the terms “meta tags,” “alt tags,” “H1s,” “H2s,” all feel like a lot, you’ll probably want to hire an agency versed in great digital marketing and branding because the code behind your website is important for a variety of reasons. It helps screen readers from an accessibility perspective, it can boost your SEO (or hurt your SEO if done wrong), and it can help ensure customers get the information they need about your products and services.

6. Build Your Site to Convert

Every page on your site should be built with conversion in mind. It should be its own mini-sales funnel that guides people to a CTA or a product they’re looking to purchase. Clean site design, clear copy, and plenty of calls to action all make a big difference, so make sure you’re using your pages appropriately to convert your visitors into customers.

7. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

We could have included this under #5, but we feel it’s important enough to be its own number on the list. We generally recommend a mobile-first design, but a good web design agency can ensure that your design is the perfect solution for desktop, mobile, and tablets. Don’t overlook this step, or you’ll cut a huge percentage of your customers out of the purchasing equation.

8. Create an Interlinking Strategy

When building your site map, make sure that you are guiding your customers deeper into your site. This means that your pages interlink with one another through textual links or CTA buttons that drive visitors to more information or, better, to another product they may want to purchase. This is a great way of ensuring a sale because the longer they’re on your site, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

If you’re an online-only business, you know that great website design is crucial to your business. If you’re a brick-and-mortar shop, don’t overlook the importance of your website’s design. The right website design can be the difference between attracting and retaining a new customer and not getting any visitors at all.

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