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Website Design Tips For A Super Successful Website

Websites are the first point of contact and often the only point of contact between businesses and customers these days. Websites serve different purposes for different businesses. Websites need to be stable, use contemporary Web technologies and follow the Web design standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Website design is about keeping oneself up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends. To create websites that stand out from millions of other websites is a difficult task indeed. However, it’ll help you achieve that if you are in step with the latest emerging website design trends. Keeping yourself abreast of the latest trends and technologies will enable you to know what appeals to online audiences these days as well as enable you to avoid those trends and technologies if you wish to be a maverick and wish to stand apart.

Website design is a specific technical skill that takes years to perfect and reputed web design companies in India such as Mind Digital have the technical professionals necessary to come up with a website that will match up to expectations of discerning clients. So, for small businesses or startups who want to focus on growing their business, outsourcing website design to agencies in India makes sense.

In this article, we’ll offer some tips and strategies that go into making a top flight website.

Build a Website That Is Secure

Security of websites is becoming more important than ever with rising number of hacking attempts happening every year. For example, a bank’s website needs to be secure. Use of https — that is building a website that receives and sends data using 128-bit encryption — is becoming more and more common across a variety of banking, publishing and other websites. This is critically important on websites where you share private and personal information such as your credit card information or social security number and so on. This matters even more if you are planning an ecommerce website with online payment options. But use https no matter what your website is about as Google advises.

Google gives a “slight ranking boost to HTTPS URLs” as mentioned here.

Use Website Design Style Guides

It helps maintain uniformity across various websites and even a website’s multiple pages when there is an internal Style Guide that you follow. Google’s Material Design Style Guide is a good example of what a style guide is about.

Planning Your Website Offline

Having an overarching plan about the look and design and components of the entire website will actually cut your website design and development coding time. Better to have things on pencil and paper or on a whiteboard so that you don’t have to repeatedly change and rewrite code. Coding may be easy these days and smart web designers will know how to use existing code that is available for free rather than writing all of it on their own, but coding is really only a small component of the complete web design cycle.

There are wireframing tools available that help you design your website on Photoshop and which you can then transfer to these tools to translate into a website.

Make Sure to Use Large Fonts And Whitespace

Make sure your website uses large web fonts and has enough whitespace to give relief to the website user and keep the website’s readability high. Choose fonts that work on different screen sizes and since more and more users are switching to mobile devices and Smartphones, fonts matter more than ever so that users don’t have to squint to read your website’s content.

Ensuring enough whitespace on the website ensures that readers will be able to focus on the important elements rather than feeling lost in a lot of clutter. This works for websites that customers may visit frequently as well as new websites belonging to startups. Find some examples of websites that use whitespace well to get inspired in your own design.

Make Sure Your Website Has Accurate Information

This may appear common sense but not having up-to-date information can be the result of negligence in maintaining your business website. For example, a restaurant website need not be as advanced as a bank website but needs to have accurate price and contact information. Same goes for other local small businesses and startups such as fast food joints, pizza delivery outlets, limousine rental companies, bike repair shops and so on. When users visit these websites to place an order or book a table, the information they get on the website needs to be accurate for customers to have a positive customer experience.

Always Use Great Imagery

Customers will likely be attracted to a website that features outstanding images. For example, a restaurant website will do well to have quality photos of its menu items. Customers are likely to be more persuaded to book a table in your restaurant if they see pictures of the dishes.

Pictures should preferably be in JPG, GIF or PNG-8 formats for faster uploading. In a mobile-first world, upload time of images and webpages matters for a smoother browsing experience and even is used as a ranking factor by Google.

Use Google’s Material Design Philosophy

Google has a great and extensive guide to its Material Design philosophy. You’ll learn a great deal about how to create the right sort of motion on websites. In terms of style of a website’s different components, Google’s guide talks in detail about what works in terms of use of color, icons, imagery, typography, and writing.

Responsive Website Design

Mobile devices are becoming the dominant way to access the web these days. Smartphones using Android and iOS come in different sizes but your website needs to look great irrespective of the screen size on which it is viewed. The solution is to use responsive web design so that customers have a smooth and delightful experience no matter what screen size or platform they are on.

It’s easy to go for responsive web design. Let us say you have decided to opt for the WordPress platform to build your website. WordPress is the world’s number one website building platform and will serve all your needs especially as a content management system. All you need to do is choose a responsive WordPress theme.

Similarly, if you are planning an ecommerce website, Magento is a popular platform option that offers all the features of an ecommerce portal. You need to opt for a responsive Magento theme on which to build your ecommerce website so that customers will be able to use your website seamlessly using different devices. Mobile ecommerce is the fastest growing segment of ecommerce and making your ecommerce website mobile-ready is absolutely essential.

There are responsive layouts in material design and the Google guide has the details.

Put Links to Social Media

Since customers may choose to interact with your business website using whatever tools best suits them or that customers are most comfortable using, your business needs to have an active presence on social media. So the website will also have links to your business’s Facebook page, Twitter handle and other social media accounts. But you need to make sure that these links are actually active so that customers don’t get disappointed. If a customer has some trouble with an electronic device and raises a query on Facebook or Twitter, the business needs to respond there appropriately by answering the customer’s query or by pointing them to the web page where their query has been answered — may be an FAQ page.

Getting The Website SEO Right

Digital marketing is what marketers are focused on these days and digital ad spends are set to overtake TV ad spends in 2018 showing a clear trend from traditional ad channels to the diversity of digital advertising channels.

The benefits of digital advertising are many. These can by highly targeted — such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads in search engine result page. These ads are placed by the search engine based on keywords. If you do proper website SEO using SEO professionals, you’ll be well-placed to benefit from PPC ads in the future.

Websites With Blogs For Content Marketing Success

One cost effective way to do digital marketing is through content marketing. This will offer long-term benefits through better placement of your website in search result organic ranking.

Having a blog on the website (www.yoursite.com/blog) is the first step to a future content marketing plan. Content on the blog can come from different sources: you can have a dedicated content writer or content expert to take care of the content requirements or even outsource the task to a digital marketing agency such as Mind Digital with expertise in content marketing.

You could develop a community of your customers who visit the blog regularly and upload fresh content, comment on other users’ content and discuss various relevant topics on different forums. These will work if you are a business that attracts devoted, enthusiastic, and passionate users. Even NASA’s Juno mission currently orbiting Jupiter lets the public participate in its JunoCam Community.

Use A/B Testing

Testing what works best is essential whether it’s the placement of a button on your website or the use of different colors. A/B testing is commonly used by many different businesses including Google, Microsoft Bing, and even The New York Times with its headlines.

But while trying out different possible combinations, one should not try to reinvent the wheel or upend the existing and common rules of website design that have become the norm over the past two decades of the Web’s existence — the long in/out button should go at the top right of your website as they do on every website. Overall, the navigation of your website should be an intuitive affair and the user should not be expected to expend brain power and time in figuring it out.

Webby Award Winners

You could take a look at the Webby Award winners in different categories to get inspired. After all, these winners were chosen by online visitors through online voting. These awards are presented in different categories such as Best Navigation/Structure, Best User Interface, and in different subcategories under the Best Visual Design category. The winning websites might provide you with some unexpected insights or inspiration.

Outsourcing Website Design

With all the different technical and aesthetic aspects involved in designing a website, you will want to go for a professional website design company to build your website. India-based website design companies will work best if you want to get outstanding results fast.

There are many professional website design companies in India such as Mind Digital who have the necessary expertise and hundreds of man-years of total experience in building websites for different clients. Whether your requirement is a content-heavy website to be built using WordPress, a niche social media or dating website, an ecommerce website, or some other startup website, outsourcing to a website design company will get you superlative results.