7 Web Design & Development Elements
1. Visual Appeal & Easy to use functionality
Most users will make a decision about your business within a split second, So your website should look professional and trustworthy. To make your website look professional it should be easy to use and navigate, and incorporating even the simplest design choices like the use of complementary colours and utilizing icons and graphics make massive leaps towards increasing the appeal and professionalism of your website.
You should also be wary that most of your customers won’t be proficient with technology. So take this into consideration when designing your website. Although it is important to have the latest technology and functionality implemented into your website it should be presented in a way that even a 10 year old could understand and use it.
2. Branding
Your website is a direct reflection of your business, it is important to incorporate themes of your brand into your website and make your brand more memorable.
3. Conversion
Make sure that your website is actually bringing you business! Sounds like a very obvious thing to say, but you would be surprised about how often businesses forget to implement a conversion strategy. You should have ways of turning users into hot leads that you can use for your business, for example a use of an enquiry form to get customer details and information that are interested in your products or services.
4. Website Speed
For both SEO and in general your websites loading time should be quick. Most web users are very impatient so if your web page isn’t loading pretty much within 1 second. You are likely to lose a lot of customers. And even more importantly your webpage speed also impacts your websites ranking (SEO) this can further ruin the visibility of your website.
5. Navigation
There’s lots of places to be creative and have unique designs when creating your website. Your sites Navigation IS NOT one of them. Where your menus are how users navigate your website should be intuitive, they shouldn’t have to have a degree in computer science to just get through your website. This is as simple as putting the navigational elements in the sites header or footer as it is done traditionally. Your Navigational elements should simply be there to get your customers to where they want to be, there’s no need to be fancy.
6. Content
As far as content is concerned. You need to make sure that your content presents that the brand is trustworthy and knows what they’re talking about. Most people will not bother to read paragraphs on paragraphs so your content needs to be to the point and direct. You should also consider the use of Statistics, Infographics, Videos, Images etc. to ‘Show rather than tell’
7. MOBILE!
Last but certainly not least, one of the most important and crucial parts of web design & development is making your Website optimised for Mobile! You would not believe the amount of websites we’ve seen that act like mobile users don’t exist when in reality the majority of users are Mobile Users. This point needs to be emphasised with some stats to really get a proper understanding of the importance of Mobile friendly and optimised websites.
- 61 percent of consumers say they are more likely to purchase from mobile-friendly sites ● 52 percent of PPC clicks come from mobile
- 52.2 percent of all website traffic is generated from mobile phones
So before launching your website, go on your phone and make sure it is optimised! One of our main priorities when developing a website is to make sure it is Responsive and optimised for Mobile otherwise you risk losing the majority of your users.
