Your website is the digital representation of your physical business. And just like your physical business, you want it to be professional looking, attractive, clean and neat. Unfortunately, if you don’t know that you don’t know how to improve your website design, then you can’t manage it successfully. Perhaps, one of the reasons you don’t know is because there is no-one on staff with the skills to tell you.
This is why hiring a professional website design agency like Envisager Studio is so important for your business’ online presence. We know how to build aesthetically pleasing, SEO optimized websites that help put your business’ best foot forward in search results.
How To Improve Your Website Design
When it’s time to redesign your website, we implement the latest technologies, fresh content, and modern design without affecting your SEO. Although we are here to help you, if you’re still trying to update or design your website yourself, the below 6 tips on how to improve your website design will be helpful.
1. Refresh Content Regularly
Yesterday, I saw a medical spa highlighting their Halloween service specials – and it’s November! The medical spa had a great idea to add seasonal service specials to their homepage. However, because it was left up too long, the idea wasn’t executed well. So, have your marketing team schedule monthly reminders to check your website to ensure that content is updated.
Another way to have fresh content regularly is to have a blog on your website. Particularly for the homepage, a set of three blog posts can be dynamically placed so that each time you write a new post, it automatically shows up on your homepage.
2. Include a Call To Action
Decide what top action you want visitors to take on your website. To get you started, here are examples of the most commonly used calls to action:
- Fill out a lead form. If you don’t have an online store, but offer services, encourage visitors to fill out what’s known as a lead form. That way you can capture their contact information and follow up with them shortly after.
- Join your email list. You can create a continuous connection with people who join your email list, allowing you to market to them. Email marketing software such as MailChimp is free for small lists. Others like Constant Contact are more robust, but only offer a minimally-sized list as a free service, and then paid subscription kicks in. In either case, you can easily add a signup form to gather email addresses to various pages of your site.
- Shop in your online store. Integrate a few products in relevant blog posts, as well as on your homepage. Doing so using shortcodes from your WooCommerce e-commerce software is a great way to entice buyers to click through. Or you can add product images with corresponding ‘Shop Now’ buttons.
3. Use Images and/or Video
If your homepage or other pages are text heavy, create sections with images and minimal text instead. As a result, you can still have the same messages you want to provide, but in smaller bite sizes that’s easier for visitors to digest. And today’s advanced smartphones take beautiful photos, so you can forego the expense of a professional photographer.
People enjoy watching all types of different videos. To help them get to know your company’s culture, create a welcome video. Or you can create a video demonstrating how to use your product or an explainer video how to use your service.
While uploading videos directly to your WordPress site offers more control over content management and hosting, they also consume lots of bandwidth and storage. Adding videos to your website this way can also lead to slower loading times if not optimized correctly.
Instead, embed videos from external platforms like Vimeo or YouTube. This method not only saves storage space, but they also contain a built-in player, and leads to faster website loading times.
4. Redesign Your Website For Success
Technology is ever changing, and what was the standard five years ago is definitely not the case today. A website redesign is for-sure how to improve your website design. In addition to giving the impression your business is not up to date, an outdated website will not have the latest technologies.
But you cannot simply just copy tired old content into a new look. Customers crave information and services that are easy to find, read and understand, as well as aesthetically pleasing. If you are a small business on a tight budget, we get that. Envisager Studio specializes in WordPress websites for small businesses because as a small business ourselves, we know the staff and budget challenges you face.
For these reasons, we offer WordPress website design and redesign at affordable prices without comprising SEO or website aesthetics.
5. Prominently Display Contact Information
Too often I see websites that don’t have their contact information prominently displayed. First, how are visitors suppose to contact you about your products or services? And second, visitors are less likely to spend any time on your site not knowing who or where you are.
One way to avoid looking like a suspicious business is to add your phone number at the top of each page. You should also have a contact page that shows all of your contact information and form to receive detailed inquiries. If you don’t have a physical location, you can still add your phone number and social media channels to your contact page. Additionally, a ‘Contact’ link should be part of your site’s main navigation.
6. Make It Responsive Design
By now, most business owners know that Google index mobile first. If you don’t know this, know that your website needs to be optimized for each device; desktop, smartphone, and tablet. This optimization provides an optimal user experience for visitors regardless of the device your site is viewed on.
Moreover, a website that does not have a responsive design will likely be downgraded in search engine results. If Envisager Studio is designing or redesigning your website, responsive design is a given. On the other hand, if you’re trying to tackle a website project yourself, make sure it is responsive so that it adjusts to mobile devices.
How To Improve Your Website Design Is Not For The Faint Of Heart
Learning all the intricacies of web design takes years of experience and the ability to understand and use code. While there are many available website builders offering cookie-cutter templates for dragging and dropping content yourself, when site problems arise, you need an expert to fix them. Not to mention, you shouldn’t want your website looking like thousands of other sites. Given these points, improving your website design involves, SEO, aesthetics, quality content, and so much more.
Get in touch with Envisager Studio today for your next professional looking, SEO optimized website design.
About the Author
Christina is the Web Content Director at Envisager Studio. She leads the content creation process and ensures tone and key messaging personifies the client’s brand and engages target markets. In her spare time, she writes about content marketing, content management, and website content.
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