When it comes to building a website for your business, creating one and running it live is not just enough. You need to optimize the design of your website. Whether you are a professional web designer or the owner of a website, you must be aware of how important website designing is.
Wondering why the design of your website matters so much? Well, when people visit your website, they take only about 0.05 seconds to form an idea about your website. Most of these opinions depend upon the design of your website.
Your websiteās design not only helps you in gaining conversions and credibility, but it is also responsible for making or breaking a successful site. According to a statistical report, it has been found that 38% of the users restrict engaging with a website that possesses a not-so-attractive layout. About 94% of the adverse feedback about the website is related to its design.Ā
Therefore, if the design of your website is not optimized for UX, it can be fatalistic for your success. So, if you want to launch a well-designed website that can convert your visitors to your target audience, then go through this blog.
It covers the latest UI/UX website design trends you should follow to create an effective and visually appealing site.
A Complete Website Designing Checklist at a Glance:Ā
In this post, we will meticulously guide you with all the important factors that you should prioritize in 2024 for designing your website. Also, it will help in optimizing the performance of your website drastically.
So, follow this guide to become aware of all the key components of website designing so that you can run a successful business website.
1. Try to Minimize your Text
Stop flooding your web pages with an excessive amount of texts!
Well, itās not about the tons of texts that you have to include while writing a blog post. Itās about the number of texts that you are including in your landing pages and homepage; it should be minimal.Ā
Of course, you wish to share everything regarding your brand, your company, the product, and services that you deal with your visitors through your website. But you must learn how to describe it in a few words. You can use catchy headlines or a few expressive words and phrases to make it look more impressive and engaging to your audience.
2. Divide your Paragraphs into Sections
Try to use shorter paragraphs in your landing web pages. You can break a long paragraph into shorter sections to make it look more crisp and clear to your audiences.Ā
Longer paragraphs are sometimes acceptable, but when it comes to the homepage, use paragraphs with a few sentences in it. Every paragraph should focus on any new information.
Deleting unnecessary texts from the pages helps to avoid clutter. It also provides you with more space so that you can put your emphasis on other important areas.
3. Use Shorter Sentences
Short and crisp sentences are always easier to go through and are user-friendly. Visitors get more attracted to this as they get a better understanding of what they want to know.
If the visitors find that the screen is full of texts and complex sentences that are hard to understand, they will find it difficult to digest the content.
So, the best idea is to mix up both long as well as shorter sentences. Like if you have already written a longer sentence, and then make sure that it follows up with a shorter one. This will also bring variety to your content.
Also Read: How To Find The Best Website Designer Under Your Budget
4. Your CTA should Stand Out and be Simple
CTA in your content plays a major role in driving conversions. Thus, the CTA needs to be obvious, bold, clear, and powerful so that it appeals to your visitors to take the next action.
According to a recent study, it has been found that almost 47% of the websites have a CTA button that comes with an eye-catching design to be spotted in three seconds or even less than that. So, there is a high possibility that you might fall into a category where it takes longer to spot the CTA button.
Without an effective CTA button, your website might suffer from a major design flaw. This is because most of the time visitors donāt feel the urge to revert back to the homepage to convert.
Thus, your CTA message should be clear and it should consist of minimal texts.
5. Use Visuals for Better Interaction
Visuals have the ability to interact in a better way with the audience as it provides a deeper explanation to them. Also, it helps in dividing your content into different sections and makes it more meaningful. Through visuals, visitors understand more in a shorter amount of time.
If you provide visuals, then probably you need to write less in the description. For instance, if you are selling a product, then instead of writing a lengthy description of it, you can just add a picture of your product and write some crisp and short details of the product. The visitors will find this idea more appealing.
6. Avoid Complex Navigation on your Website
Visitors browse through your website for a reason, either looking out for information or for purchasing something, etc. Whatever may be the reason, the visitors of your website will leave it if they find difficulty in navigation or figuring out what they are looking for.
With so much competition out there, visitors will have no reason to stick to your website if they find it complex to navigate. Thus, complex navigation and designing of your website can even be responsible for declining your conversion rates.
So, you need to limit your options on the website for easy navigation. You should make the selection accordingly that fit your needs. You should also look out for ways to remove unnecessary menu options.
The moment you simplify the navigation process of your website, you will find that your conversions are far higher than before. To avoid complications, you can also use a search bar.
7. Optimize your Websiteās Design for Mobile Browsing
Nowadays, a mobile-optimized website is essential because even search engines reward sites that are mobile-friendly. As per the Alexa rankings, it has been observed that around 80% of the top websites are optimized for mobile devices.Ā
Mobile designing websites are a priority. If your companyās website is poorly designed or not optimized for mobile devices, then there are high chances that customers will not recommend your business or brand to others.
In fact, most of the people will judge your website depending upon its responsive design elements. So, it should be eliminated and fixed properly.
Also Read: 11 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Web Designer
8. Reinforcing Familiar Actions
Make sure that you should set up a certain flow in your website so that the visitors who land on your page find it easy to navigate and convert in seconds. For example, if a visitor lands on your website and finds different types of CTA buttons on different web pages, like Homepage, Product Page, Category page, etc., there is no reinforcement.
In a simple way, by maintaining similar patterns, you can reinforce familiar actions to your website. Like, if you look at a product page, there you will find different products featured in view.
Each of the products has a title followed by a snippet description and two options: Buy and Learn More. Similarly, other products should also be presented following the same format. This is how you can reinforce familiar actions to your website. This design principle should be implemented on your website.Ā
9. Implement Proper SEO Strategies
When it comes to designing your website, SEO plays a major role. If you do not prioritize SEO and just add keywords to your blog posts, this SEO strategy is not just enough. You need to focus upon the on-site optimization, i.e., on-page elements of your website.
Like, you can create an XML sitemap. This will display the bots major information about the web page, like, when it was last updated, what is its location on your site, what is its updating frequency, its relationship with other pages and so on.Ā
Thus, a proper sitemap helps the search engine crawlers to analyze the contents on your website and verify that it does not have any duplicate contents. While designing your website, also ensure that the architecture of your website follows a logical hierarchy.
10. Run A/B Tests and Choose Color Schemes that Meets your Brand
As no perfect website exists, you need to run A/B tests to improve the design of your website. Every element of it to be tested, like, the color and location of the CTA button, the size of your navigation bar, the images you use on the landing pages, the variations of the words and texts on the screen, etc.
Furthermore, you must make such a color choice for your website that perfectly fits your branding strategy. Research shows that brand recognition can be increased by up to 80% by choosing appropriate color schemes. Color schemes often refer to the logo, sign, or website, so ensure that it must perfectly match your brand image.
Thus, choosing appropriate color schemes is important for your website design, so select the one that matches the brand as well as the logo image.
11. Monitor the Loading Speed of Your Web Page
You must be wondering about what the loading speed of the page has to do with the website designing? Well! The website design choices that you make have a great impact on the loading speed of your page.Ā
Whenever you add any media files, images, or videos to your website, it affects the loading time of your website to a great extent. In fact, if your web page takes a longer time to load, then visitors are more likely to leave your website and never return to it. According to a recent study, it has been found that out of every 100 visitors, 40% of them abandon websites that take more than three seconds to load.
You can apply the following things to your website design so that its loading speed can be optimized: avail help of browser caching tools, by reducing HTTP requests and the file size of your images, improving your TTFB, and so on.
In addition to this, you can also take advantage of the lots of free tools available online for accomplishing these tasks. Also, whenever you make any changes in your website designing, you need to monitor the loading time of your web pages from time to time. For this, you can also use a popular tool from Google, the Page Speed Insights.
12. Consider Using Bullet Points
While looking out for any information, when the visitors land on your website, they prefer that information that is well-structured, crisp, and easy to follow. So, at this point of time, if they had to follow long-form writings and paragraphs, then chances are there that they might donāt want to go through those paragraphs.
On the other hand, if you use bullet points and make a list, then the information goes handy. Studies reveal that people prefer to look at lists with bullet points, rather than any other formats.
Conclusion
No matter whether your website is a brand new or itās been there for a decade, its design matters a lot. Thus, these are the best website designing practices that one can follow in 2024 to make their website a successful one.Ā
Not only a professional website designer can be benefited from this piece of information, but even a website owner must also take care of these factors. They can use this checklist as a guide to make improvements in their website designing. Yes, you cannot implement all these strategies and design suggestions overnight, but you can start working on the design principles of your website to make it successful.
It’s wise to partner with a skilled UI/UX design agency that can help audit your existing site and implement these best practices for modern web design in a strategic way. Their expertise can elevate your website and transform the user experience.
