When it comes to your website design there are several key factors and techniques which will help your website audience understand what your site is about. Many different businesses utilise their websites in several different ways including:

• A website to sell digital or physical products
• A research website for site visitors to find more information about their business
• A contact reference website. A simple web design allowing for users to get contact information
• A marketing tool

Some other types of businesses, generally long-standing established business do not see the value of having a website. A website is simply a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week window into your business, essentially a shopfront that never closes.

If you are small to medium size business and have a website but do not feel that it is giving you extra return on investment, you may need to evaluate and ask yourself the question, does my website meet the needs of my site visitors? In the rest of this article, we will try to answer this question by looking at the individual website design tips we are going to share.

Keep your target audience in mind

Many businesses look to create a piece of art when it comes to their website utilising some of the latest design techniques which are at the cutting edge of development. Some of these things include parallax, jQuery carousels, custom animations, etc. This is all well and good if your trying to create a state of the art website, but is this really what is needed? If you are a plumber the likelihood is your client will require an emergency service and will not have the time to appreciate all of the effort put in. Again this applies to other business sets such as driving schools. Most people looking to learn to drive will want to find an instructor with a decent car and a good price and will maybe find the website nice but in the sum of things, all the fancy gimmicks do not help with the ROI (return on investment).

If you are a web design agency looking to showcase how skilled you are then this would be a good idea to show your design flair.

The rule of thumb generally when building websites is to make sure the design is simple. This does not mean your website has to have a boring look and feel, but you can utilise imagery and colour to make a good website.

Consider your website usability

This then leads to my next point and coincides well with “website design with the target audience in mind”. When it comes to good web design usability is one of the key factors in making sure website visitors get a good experience when using your website. If your site visitors cannot use your website, they will most likely jump off your webpage and go to a competitors website.

You want to allow your clients freedom to explore your website easily with good navigation menus and click to action banners and buttons across different sections on your website. If a website visitors are able to navigate around your site with ease, this will increase their return rate, lower website bounce rate and overall lead to a conversion.

One technique, post website launch is to monitor the website with heat mapping to track how website visitors use the website. This way you can make you get the most out of your website.

Website consistency

One of the biggest issues I find when using websites across the internet is there are lots of inconsistencies on different businesses websites. The biggest negative on a website is confusing your site visitors by inconsistencies which will lead them to move away and find a website that will appeal and be much easier to use.

Different elements of consistency in your webpage are important. You need to make sure your content is consistent throughout and clear to site users. Another key factor is to make sure the design and the branding are clear and not different across the different pages of your website. This way clients will feel the security that they are still on your webpage.

Be Mobile and Tablet Website Friendly

The whole internet has changed dramatically over the last 4-5 years with a demand on the mobile-friendly website being at its highest. Mobile websites and responsive are seen a minimum requirement nowadays with Google preferring a single code base website.

More and more of us are using mobile devices to access websites on the go whether it’s on a train during the daily commute or in the evening whilst watching TV. As the way, we use websites has evolved business need to evolve to make sure the site visitors again have the best usability when using the website and in particular on any device type.

As you can see from this website the percentage of web pages served to mobile phones from 2009 to 2018 has dramatically increased: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241462/global-mobile-phone-website-traffic-share/

Most reputable website designers including Mosaic Digital Media Ltd always consider building websites to be responsive no matter how big or small the project is.

Website Content Is King

One of the biggest factors of your website will increase the conversion rate or make website visitors want to pick up the phone to you is genuine content. If a website is able to buy into your business it will be the approach to your content. Content is also a huge factor in gaining natural Google positioning as Google likes genuine content that does not look like it has been manufactured and manipulated to just gain positioning.

If you can strike the balance between good content that isn’t too long but yet is informative enough you will find more and more visitors to your website will enjoy the experience and pick up the phone or fill out a contact form on your webpage.

Use The Right Images For Your Website

Time and time again I will see hundreds and hundreds of websites using poorly shot camera pictures to display their products or services. I also see lots of website designs using far too much stock imagery across the website making them look fake or genuine.

Good website design requires a good balance of carefully picked stock imagery for backgrounds and hero sections and good photography of your products and services. I would always recommend what sells best is to make sure your website design uses around 70% of your images to 30% stock images. If you need too I would recommend getting a photographer or amateur/college photographer to come and takes some pictures rather than using blurry images from an old smartphone.

By using this balance we can make sure you come across genuine to your website visitors.

Overall website design isn’t too hard to do, you just need to keep everything simple and make sure you come across genuine to all of your site visitors. By striking a good balance between well-written content and good use of imagery you are on a good path to ensuring you get the best return on investment.