What does a great web design look like? If you were to ask a dozen different business owners—or professional web designers, for that matter—you might get a dozen different answers.
That’s not really surprising, given that artistic instincts are subjective and every business or marketing situation is unique. The right answer for one group or client wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate for another.
Once you get past surface considerations like fonts and images, though, you’ll find that there really are a handful of guiding principles that separate the very best web designs from the rest. In other words, award-winning websites, along with the most profitable ones, might not look alike but they do share key traits. Today we want to explore a few of them so you can understand what makes them so powerful.
Let’s look at the common ingredients to any stunning and effective web design…
Instant Focus and Clarity
When someone arrives at your website for the first time, two things should happen instantly. The first is that they should be immediately impressed. Your site should load quickly, have compelling images, and have a professional look. The second thing is they should be able to understand intuitively what your business is about in just a fraction of a moment.
Focus and clarity are crucial to the strength of your web design. Buyers don’t like to be confused and will click away in less than a few seconds if they can’t determine who you are or what you offer. So, you need to grab their attention and hit them with something that makes them want to hang around.
Organization and White Space
The human eye is designed to look for certain patterns and structures. It doesn’t like to be stressed with clutter or confusion. That’s the reason it’s pleasing to walk into a clean and orderly hotel room, but distressing to step into an apartment that is messy.
The same dynamic plays out on your website. When a visitor arrives for the first time they want to see clean lines, organized thoughts, and plenty of white space. They can’t appreciate the aesthetic beauty of your pages if they are too distracted by visual debris getting in the way of bigger ideas.
Clear and Intuitive Navigation
Regardless of what your website looks like and the visual choices you and your design team may have made, visitors will appreciate clear and intuitive navigation structures. They want menus, search bars, and links that make it easy for them to move from one page or idea to the next.
While you may have been focused on including wonderful aesthetics in your web design, most customers aren’t stopping by your pages to appreciate them artistically. They just want to find what they’re looking for. Maximizing usability serves a double purpose of giving visitors what they want while also enhancing the organization we’ve already mentioned.
Funnel-Focused Customer Flows
Have you ever noticed how a great business website moves you subtly in one direction or another? The content, links, and even images point you towards certain outcomes (usually a buy button, lead submission form, or other conversion step).
Creating a funnel to drive visitors towards a certain action or conclusion involves planning throughout the entire website, down to the page level. It might mean setting up navigation so it leads to a terminal page, or choosing images where models are looking in the direction of a desired link or button. What matters most is that there’s a point to your website and you are encouraging visitors to move towards a step that helps them to further their search and come closer to doing business with you.
Will Your Next Business Website be Special?
You already know that it isn’t enough to have a standard, off-the-shelf website in today’s hyper-competitive digital business world. So, why settle for your typical run-of-the-mill web design team?
If you want to create something amazing for your company, and enjoy the bottom-line benefits that come with it, contact us today to schedule a free consultation!
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