Your website is the emissary of your business and builds your brand image among the web users. A good website can help you outshine your competitors and boost the profitability of your business within a short time span.
When web users visit a website, they pay most importance to the look and feel of the site. If the site does not look professional, they will hardly waste any time there. So, what is the secret to develop a professional looking website design? Here are some great suggestions for you.
1. First impressions matter the most
Web users hardly spend 20-30 seconds to judge the value of a site and they give most importance to the home page. Therefore, design the home page very carefully. Your site should impress the visitors as soon as they land.
2. Decrease load time
Visitors don’t like slow loading websites. If your site takes too much time to load, users will leave and may never come back. Therefore, optimize the page loading time by using optimized images and keep each webpage size minimal, so that the browser can render it quickly.
3. Simple navigation
Website navigation is like railways tracks. One path should lead to another and each destination should be properly highlighted. Let’s assume that you are building an e-commerce website and you will sell various types of products. In that case, you should create categories and sub-categories to help visitors find the products faster.
4. Maintain colour combination
Selection of colours is very important because not only it affects readability, but also helps you showcase the personality of your brand. For instance, different shades of pink colour can be used in a cosmetics company’s website that targets mainly female customers. On the contrary, a fast food company can use red and yellow colours as these help increase hunger.
5. Maintain browser compatibility
These days people access website from various devices such as PC, tablet and smartphone. These devices feature different types of mobile and web browsers. Therefore, you must check the compatibility of your site on those browsers. If someone tries to open your site from a mobile browser and the site does not respond, your brand reputation will get affected.
6. Use suitable fonts
Always use web safe fonts that can be rendered by browsers without any issue. Don’t use fancy fonts in your corporate website because users may not take your site seriously if the text seems funny to them. You should use standard sans serif fonts that suit the brand persona of your business to impress the visitors.
7. Professional graphics is a must
Images of your products and employees are some of the things that visitors will check closely to evaluate the quality of your business. Therefore, always use high resolution, web friendly graphics and photos in your site. Even if someone does not read the website content, images should give him an idea of your business visually.
8. Do not use Flash
If you think Flash animation looks great, then think twice. Flash is an old technology and can affect the ranking of your site on SERP. Mobile operating systems stopped supporting Flash and it is a known fact that search engines can’t read Flash content. If animation is a must for your website design, implement HTML5 to create a professional website.
9. Make it distinct
The overall look of your website should be completely different from the competitors sites. Never copy any other company’s design and try to establish your uniqueness with the help of web design.
It takes creativity and intelligent marketing ideas to develop a unique and professional website. Follow the ideas shared above and you will be able to create an eye-catching website for your company.
Author bio: Jonathan Patterson is a veteran website designer. He mainly works as a freelancer and writes blog posts on web and graphic design. Click here to read his other articles.
The 20% largest companies still have to rely on large design agencies. To unfold an international corporate identity of a big company, a large and experienced agency is needed like Web Design New York. The other 80% of the companies can do great with networks of professional designers. Those are networks with people that are very passionate and keen to deliver a smart working product.
Thank you for this informative post on secrets to design a professional website. Thanks a lot Jonathan and will hope to see more post from you.