Top 5 Ways to Create an Effective Website Design

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Steve Jobs famously said “Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.” That’s true of the hardware products Jobs brought to market over the course of his remarkable career, and it’s true for your website.
More than any other factor, the success of your website comes down to usability and utility, not simply visual design. Nothing happens on your site until a visitor takes some kind of action. You could create the most visually stunning and attractive home page in the world. But if users don’t click through to the next article, request a white paper or consultation, sign up for a newsletter, or in some way engage with your brand and ultimately identify themselves to you, your business won’t grow by a single new customer.
The purpose of your website is to get discovered, encourage first-time visitors to become repeat users, nurture those users into interested leads, and ultimately convert them into paid clients. Here are the top five factors you need to design into your website to effectively educate, engage, and convert new users into loyal customers.

Fast-Loading Pages Are Essential.

According to a study by MachMetrics, as page load time goes from one to three seconds, the probability of a user exiting your site increases 32%. At five seconds the bounce rate goes up by 90%!
You have a limited window of opportunity to engage users when they first land on your site. Before you do anything else on your website, make sure your pages load fast. Here are some of the most common basic ways to shave precious seconds off of page-load time.

• Resize and compress images. Before you upload images, reduce them to the size you wish them to appear on your web page. Then use compression to further reduce the file size. Use the Smush plugin on your WordPress site, or other compression tools for non-WP sites.
• Clean and compress, or minify, the page code. This removes unnecessary or redundant data and extra spaces to optimize page speed. Common codes to consider minifying include HTML – the content and structure of the page, CSS – the design and display of the content, and JavaScript – the functionality of certain features on the page.
• If you use JavaScript, use the defer attribute to ensure the rest of your content loads first, with no delay. Free plugins are available to do the job on WordPress sites.
• Use a streamlined mobile-optimized theme. First, your web pages will open faster. And second, mobile now accounts for up to 50-60% of all searches. If you design only for the desktop, you’ll miss out on half of all organic search traffic.
• If you currently use standard shared hosting for your website, consider the very modest cost to upgrade to managed shared hosting. Your website will be optimized for speed through personalized web caching rules and other performance enhancements. Bonus points: Your site will be much more secure, too.

Make Navigation Easy.

According to Krug’s first law of usability, your website should be so obvious and self-explanatory, a person of average ability or experience can use it without getting frustrated or lost. Design your website navigation with familiarity, repetition, and accepted web conventions as your guideposts. People are creatures of habit, after all. If users can’t find a topic or figure out how to use a feature, that content or feature is wasted – and so is your opportunity to capture a lead. The goal of your website is to collect clicks and signups, not awards for avant-garde design. Follow these navigation best practices to effectively guide visitors through the customer journey on your website.

• Be consistent.  Your navigation links should look the same and appear in the same location on every page. A visitor should never have to think about how to get to any other page.  A solid approach is to feature your navigation links in your home page header, then use the same header on every page of your website.
• Use clear, descriptive keywords unique to your business.  These will instantly communicate your products and expertise.  Those keywords also will drive search traffic, especially since they appear on every page of your site. Avoid terms such as Products, Services, and Solutions. They could apply to any website, and they won’t drive search traffic to yours.
• Show a limited number of menu items.   Peoples’ short-term memory holds seven items.  Limit the number of navigation links to make it easy for visitors to remember where they’ve been and where they want to go next. It’s also better for search engines:  The more concise your navigation, the more “authority” is assigned to your linked pages, which helps those pages rank higher in search.
• Make sure visitors always know where they are.  It’s reassuring and builds familiarity when users can quickly see where they are on your site. Highlight or color code the corresponding keyword in the menu bar, display the keyword in large type in the header of the individual interior page, and use breadcrumbs at the top of every article. An added benefit of breadcrumbs is they help search engines better rank your site.
• Make your navigation mobile friendly. You’ll find responsive designs and themes for every major content management system.  A prominent hamburger menu icon is important on mobile devices to clearly highlight navigation links. Make sure the links themselves are large enough to tap easily on the small screen.

Communicate Clearly and Quickly.

Microsoft estimates you have roughly eight seconds to grab a person’s attention. For the record, that’s one second less than the nine-second attention span they ascribe to a goldfish. The upshot is, every page on your website must have a clear purpose, and you don’t want site visitors to have to think about it. The following suggestions will help reduce friction and enable users to explore your website free of any obstacles along the way.

• Go easy on text. Say what you need to say in the fewest words possible. Don’t bog down users with a lot of reading and thinking. (Obviously, we’re not talking about your blog page here.) Your home page and main article pages should be airy and quick reading. Use short sentences and short paragraphs. Eliminating unnecessary text not only forces you to communicate quickly and clearly, it also reduces clutter and makes your call to action (CTA) more obvious.
• Apply the rule of thirds. This design guideline is based on studies of how viewers’ eyes scan a photograph, painting, or web page. Imagine a big tic-tac-toe board superimposed on your laptop screen. The points where the lines intersect are the four hotspots on the page for capturing attention. Those hotspots determine where to place the most important elements of the design – your logo, a product shot, or a CTA.
• Leave plenty of white space. A cluttered, cramped web page causes the same apprehension as being stuck in a cluttered, cramped room. Leave sufficient white space (sometimes referred to as negative space) between the various elements on the page. The open area provides a break for the viewer’s eye and mind, and makes the important elements stand out.
• Make CTAs clear and obvious. Remember the main purpose of your website. Every call to action – whether to schedule a consultation, download a whitepaper, sign up for a newsletter, or make a purchase – must be instantly recognizable. Include some kind of CTA on every page of your site, in the same location on the page, with the same bold design. As with site navigation, rely on familiarity, repetition, and habit to drive more clicks on your calls to action.