A website is one of the most important marketing tools of any business, whether you work from home or you own a large corporation. Every business throughout the world has a website these days as a way to market themselves to their target audience, increasing their visibility and improving sales turnover.
One of the most important factors of web design is to ensure you have a professionally designed website. In many cases when you purchase your URL you are given access to free template in order to create your design. These are not what you are looking for; you are not able to tailor your site to your audience. You need a professional design to create a good first impression with customers.
A very important factor which you need to discuss with your design team is navigation. Pages should be easy to find. When a customer is looking for a particular product or service, they don’t want to try and figure out where it is; they want to find it quickly. If they are unable to do so, they will just move on to the next website.
This is why during the web design process, you need to ensure the pages load quickly, as people don’t have the patience to sit and wait for a page to load. Again, they will just move on to another site.
It is so important to ensure you use clear photographs and pictures on your site and they need to relate to the service or product you are offering. Don’t confuse your customers by showing a photograph or picture that has nothing to do with the wording. As part of your web design, ensure that you name each picture and link it, increasing your brand visibility.
Any writing you include on your website should be informative and to the point. People don’t want to visit a site about one product and find that nothing gives them the details and information they require. Be very careful about this, ensure you provide your customers with all the information they need to make an informed decision.
One of the biggest mistakes that a company makes when designing their website is the font that they choose. You need to choose a font which can be read easily, while italics are desirable to the naked eye, they can be particularly difficult to make out when you want to read something quickly and easily. Be aware of this and choose your font with care.
When working with your web design team, ensure they design your website based on your target audience. An audience interested in technology is not going to want to see a site filled with frills and fuss, they want to see the technological side with information. This is such an important element to your design; ensure you don’t stray from this.
Ensure you include social media links and buttons. Social media plays a large role in a company’s visibility and providing these links enables customers to go directly from your website and follow you on Twitter or like you on Facebook.
Use SEO throughout your website, your web design team will be able to explain this to you. Ensuring you do this will help your ranking on search engines, pushing you to the top of searches done on specific keywords relating to the type of business that you have and products or services you provide.
Once the site is completed, take the time to try it out for yourself, putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. Imagine searching for an item and see how you feel about the experience before publishing the site to the internet.