There are literally hundreds of millions of websites on the internet today. Whether you run your own personal blog or small-medium sized company, or a multinational, having a web presence is standard.
With every website, you have to ensure it is up-to-date in terms of style and design if you want it to stand out.
But designing your own website isn’t as simple as adding little bells and whistles here and there. When it comes to having a modern design, one that is effective and compelling, knowing exactly what to include is incredibly important.
When you utilise effective web design elements, you are able to attract significant amounts of visitors to your site. This may mean, implementing SEO (search engine optimisation) and CRO (conversion rate optimisation) to get the most out of your site.
If you want to create a strong first impression, then you should go with a clean and modern design. When we look at contemporary site designs, you find sophisticated and trendy elements that are able to mould to fit the user’s needs.
But, having a site that is well designed, with both attractive and clean elements is only the beginning. As a great user experience is equally as important.
Below you will find a list of 6 core elements that you should implement to improve the functionality and appearance of your site.
1. White Space
White space is an integral aspect of the minimalist design. When done correctly, it allows your site to breathe. Because the internet is essentially an encyclopaedia of infinite knowledge, a surfer can very easily get to the point of exhaustion. However, when you balance your site design up, using white space and strategically placed content, it will ensure your site is readable, clean, organised and easily navigable.
When we look at white space, one can argue that Apple are the ones most responsible for popularising this design element.
2. Browser Compatibility
Cross-browser compatibility is an issue that comes up when a website doesn’t render the same way across multiple browsers, versions and operating systems.
These cross-browser issues are caused by the various base engines of which the web browser is built upon.
This means, the various browsers choose the features that will be incorporated into it, along with the features that they do not want – for whatever reason. Thus, a website using a feature recently discarded by the browser, ends up not rendering as it should; this results in a sharp revenue loss.
To ensure compatibility across all browsers, you will need to carry out your own independent testing. You can choose whether to do it manually or through the use of online systems.
3. Navigation
Whatever website design you go with, it should always be easy for you to navigate through, this means, menu items that are easily accessible. The site viewer should always know their location on the website, and should be able to access any part of the site within a few clicks. A site map is an effective addition, which should be used if possible.
This should go without saying, however, a lot of web designers miss this. If you implement such measures, it will improve your site. However, it’s important to note that there is a fine line between a site that is annoying and one that is highly interactive.
4. Interactive Elements
When we look at many sites nowadays, interactivity is a very common aspect of it.
This may include polls, quizzes, webinars, eBooks, polls, calculators and much more.
Besides these interactive elements keeping your visitor entertained, it also helps to provide an avenue for data collection. The same collection of information that can be used to provide a more personalised life experience.
Whenever you decide to add a more extensive lead magnet, such as an eBook download, webinar or enrolment, you should always ask your visitors to provide you with an email address
It’s possible to grow your email list while creating and adding value to your email subscribers.
5. SEO Optimized Elements
If you want to improve your sites rankings in the search engines, then you can’t go wrong with the appropriate web design elements. Some of these elements may be invisible, such as header tags, META tags and other such coding hacks which may belong to the sites back-end. You want to insert, then tweak and later optimise these elements on your website, so that you can get to enjoy the full benefits of Google’s search engine.
One thing to note is that Google’s search engine likes websites that are fast. So you should keep that in mind, when developing it. Another thing to consider is content quality. This is probably the most important aspect of any web design element.
6. Website Accessibility
Website accessibility is basically about creating web designs that allow for people of all walks of life to access and navigate through them – irrespective of what conditions are put in place.
You always want to look at ways of improving your site, even if that means, removing barriers that may be making your site harder to navigate through. You’ll want to think about individuals that are hearing or visually impaired.
For example, one thing to consider is that a visually impaired person, is unlikely to be able to see your sites images, however, they may be able to hear audible, assigned to these images via its text attributes.
This means, adding a brief description on every photo on any website, so that eReaders out there can understand what they may or may not be be looking at.
Additionally, there’s also the possibility of adding subtitles to your video content, while resizing its font.
With your modern web design, you have something that is able to deliver engaging content along with compelling visuals, while offering a united user experience, regardless of how individuals may view it.
You should use all the elements discussed above as an excellent starting point for designing a streamlined, stylish and quick small business site. That is able to engage your viewers while increasing its profits.
–AUTHOR INFO—
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website.