On the Internet, web design tips are a dime a dozen. Many people have opinions on what the perfect website looks like. That’s because, to a certain extent, the design is subjective. What one person likes, another might find hideous.
At the same time, web design is one of the most important factors for the success of a website. Almost half of the people say that the design of a website is their main factor in judging a company’s credibility. As a consequence, it also influences conversions, bounce rate, and more.
Sigh, if only there was a way to find some objective data on how to create a successful web design. Wait, there is! And a bunch of it has been compiled in this article. Stay on the page for some web design tips backed by science. Stop relying on your gut feeling and start doing things proven to work.
Science-based Web Design Tips to Crush Your Next Website Project
In the following, you will find some research-based tips and tricks on how to improve your web design.
Do you have additional web design tips based on research? If so, please share in the comments below.
1. Have a plan
Don’t just start designing your website. To ensure that your website is effectively meeting the needs of your visitors you need to map out your buyer’s journey from the first time they visit your website to the moment they become a customer.
What pages are they going to view, what content are they going to read, and what offers are they going to convert on? Understanding this will help you design a website that helps nurture leads through the sales funnel.
You want to design your website for the next step, not the final step. It’s all about answering the right questions in the right order. This might be where context comes into play. Take what you already know about your current customers (or even interview them) and research how they went from a visitor to a customer. Then, use this data to map out your strategy.
2. Keep it Simple
Continuing with the theme of less, this also applies to your design in general. A huge study by Google has shown that visitors don’t like visual complexity. The gist: the more complex your design, the less it is perceived by visitors as beautiful.
What does that mean for your website? Besides the point above, here are a few ideas:
Rethink the sidebar — More and more websites are ditching the sidebar in favor of a single-column design (for example, the one you are on right now). It means fewer distractions and puts the focus clearly on the content.
Stick to standard layouts — People love familiarity and can get weirded out by non-standard website designs. Therefore, it can be a good idea to stick with familiar design tropes and layouts. You can still find ways to stand out in other ways.
3. Leverage the Fold
Whether or not there is still such a thing as the fold is part of a heated debate. Some say that because of the multitude of screen sizes these days, the fold doesn’t matter anymore. Others have a different opinion.
However, the fact is that even in 2018, people spend 57 percent of their time above the fold with a sharp decline afterward. 74 percent of their time is dedicated to the first two screen full.
So, it seems like the fold still matters. For your website that means you need to prioritize your content and use the available space to hook users in so they continue. Here are some tips on how to do that:
Use a clear and descriptive headline — Explain what your website can do for visitors, highlight the benefits. Be brief and use power words. For more advice, look into our copywriting tips.
Include your main call to action — To improve your chances for converting, the fold is the time to start the user journey. Make sure your CTA is clear and visible.
Include media — Images, videos, or audio help emphasize your point. We will talk more about visual content further below.
4. Don’t be afraid of white space
Whitespace is an essential design element that helps you break up the page and increase readability.
Also called ‘negative space’, white space refers to the areas around elements on a page that are empty and lacking content or visual items.
Although extra space may seem superfluous, it’s responsible for readability and content prioritization. It also plays an important role in the design process and positioning website design elements.
5. Navigation
When designing your website, navigation is key, it’s essentially the map that displays the core places users can visit.
There’s nothing worse than a website with a disorganized or confusing navigation interface. When improving your website’s navigation, it’s important to ensure that your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.
Some characteristics of a lean navbar include streamlined content, navigation hierarchy, and responsive design, so the experience doesn’t drastically change on mobile.
If users cannot find what they’re looking for, they have no reason to stay on your website. Instead, they will certainly bounce and find a competitor that offers a better user experience.
6. Avoid Carousels, Sliders, Tabs, and Accordions as possible
Website owners love carousels. It’s probably one of the most client-requested features. Unfortunately, the research says that they are pretty useless.
One of the most mind-blowing data comes from Notre Dame University. The webmaster there noticed that the first slide on a carousel received almost 90 percent of the clicks while the rest were largely ignored.
Ninety percent! Doesn’t sound like the other slides are even worth being there, does it? Seems like web designers who talk their clients out of using a slider had it right, to begin with.
Tabs and accordions have the same problem as sliders and carousels – they often go ignored. This is compounded by the fact that few visitors read the entire page. Most people merely scan and are therefore not very likely to make extra clicks to see your content.
However, what if you need to include the information placed in those areas somehow? We are getting exactly that right now.
7. Use the right images
Not every image is going to fit with the type of message you’re trying to show your audience.
Fortunately, you have a lot to choose from (even some that are for free). But still, cause caught many of us decide to plague our website with extremely stocky photos.
Just because a stock website has the image, doesn’t mean it looks genuine and will evoke trust in your company. Ideally, you want to use photos that portray images of the real people that work at your company and the office itself.
If real photographs aren’t an option, there are techniques you can use to help pick out the right type of stock photo. This will aid in bringing more realism to your brand and making sure the images match who you are and what your content is explaining.
8. Use the Right List Order
Using lists, both ordered and unordered is a great way to make information more accessible. However, it turns out that here, too, human attention is fickle.
This is because of the so-called serial-position effect. It says that in a list, you are most likely to remember both the items in the beginning and at the end. The middle section, on the other hand, goes largely forgotten.
The lesson here: When listing attributes of your product or service, make sure to put the most important where they are likely to make an impact.
9. Include social share and follow buttons
Producing great content and offers only go so far if you aren’t allowing your users to share what you have.
If your website currently lacks social share buttons, you could be missing out on a lot of social media traffic that’s generated from people already reading your blog!
If this sounds new to you, social sharing buttons are the small buttons that are around the top or bottom of blog posts. They contain icons of different social media websites and allow you to share the page directly on the social media channel of your choice.
These buttons act as a non-pushy tool that encourages social sharing from your buyer personas.
If you are looking for some tools to get you on the ground, check out the two free, social sharing tools SumoMe and Shareaholic.
Take the time to add in call-to-actions that give them materials to educate themselves and help solve their pain points.
Once they identify your company as one that provides materials that are relieving these, they will feel more comfortable researching your services to see if you can personally make these solutions a reality.
Some example call-to-actions are to click here for more information, download our sample GamePlan, sign up for a webinar, watch the video, see all inbound marketing services, and see pricing.
For more information, check out this offer to get you using call-to-actions the right way to generate even more leads.
10. Let your visitors scroll on your homepage
Above the fold is old. Don’t be wary of designing a slightly longer homepage. Including 3-5 sections that help direct new and recurring users to proper areas of your website can help create a seamless experience.
But what should these sections be?
This list could go on forever, but a quick hit-list of some of the more crucial elements includes:
- Value proposition
- Intro Video
- Overview of Services
- Product Features
- About Us
- Testimonials
- Case Studies/Success Stories
- Resources
If you want a more expansive list, check out this awesome infographic or one of Ramona Sukhraj’s blog articles revealing other important homepage elements not mentioned here.
11. Mobile optimization
Don’t forget about optimizing your website for mobile. If you don’t already know, 80% of internet users own a smartphone, and “Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile website they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s website instead”.
I’d be a little concerned if I were you.
It’s a necessity to tailor your website to fit the needs and wants of your visitors. You might want to ask yourself, why would someone access my website on mobile? What things would they look for? Does my experience currently allow them to do those things easily?
If your website is lagging on its mobile optimization, check out some of these awesome mobile websites to understand how they have created seamless mobile experiences for their users.
12. Identify unknown 404s or broken links
Depending on the size of your website, or how long it’s been around, you may have a few pages or links here and there that aren’t working. And on top of all that, your visitors won’t even let you know.
Take the time to evaluate whether or not your website has broken pages. You may be surprised to find previously high performing landing pages that are unpublished or website pages that are improperly linked.
You can find some tools to use here and here to get you started.
13. Make Website Speed an Absolute Priority
It’s probably one of the least debated facts in the web design sphere that speed is important. Research has shown that it influences everything from bounce rate over user satisfaction to conversions and revenue.
If your website is slow, visitors will not stick around. Period. Plus, because users care, search engines also do and factor your page loading speed into their rankings. For that reason, it’s paramount that you invest in making your website as fast as possible.
14. Never stop testing
Evaluating conversion paths, how far users scroll, and where they are clicking, etc, are important qualities that can reveal if your pages are performing the way you intended.
If you’re someone that has tons of pages to go through, chances are you may find this issue on a lot of pages, especially older landing pages.
Pages like these may be performing quite well, but contain outdated information that you know could be updated.
Others may just need some tweaking updates or design changes. Simple changes such as look and feel, button colors, headers, or adding a few sentences in your copy could make incredible differences in the page’s performance.
But rather than changing them and set them on their way, especially if you do not know what to change, you can use tools to create A/B tests for them, multivariate tests, or even set up heat maps to see what users are doing.
Each test can reveal more variety of data that identifies why users are interacting with pages in particular ways.
15. Create new or unique offerings
Converting visitors is the core way you can evaluate how many users are moving down your marketing funnel. Many of us know that the way you typically convert visitors is by presenting offers, demos, or items that they will find attractive.
But with so many resources out on the internet, it’s now more difficult than ever to break through the noise and get people converting on yours.
This means it’s more important than ever to not only pay attention to what offers and resources are out there within your service area, but what isn’t too.
Maybe you are a social media company that notices many other competitors are making eBooks on how to create a social media calendar.
Rather than creating a similar offer, could you take it a step further and create a tool that allows people to enter in some information that helps generate a schedule that syncs to their Google calendar?
If this seems too complicated, you could also try identifying templates that are not currently widely available and quickly creating one and promoting it.
Whatever your decision, it’s important to make sure what you are doing is a step above your competitors. Copying content offers that are currently out there will only keep you lost at sea.
16. Update your content to appeal to your persona
When you are writing a copy that you want to impress your website visitors with, many of us tend to fall into a dangerous trap.
The content is ‘we’ and ‘our’ focused.
“We will increase revenue by..”, “Our benefits include…” are just examples of the headers that many use throughout web pages. Although you may be showcasing the ways your business might help because of how great you and your products are, it’s not going to get the point across.
Strip out the “we’s” and “our’s” and replace them with “you’s” and “your’s”. Your potential customers want you to meet them eye-to-eye, understand the pain points they have, and directly explain how they could be solved.
So rather than a header like “Our Case Studies,” try something like ‘”our Potential Success Story.”
Or rather than a careers page that focuses on how great the company is, filter in some content that explains how applicants’ futures are important and their ability to define their future working at your business.
This grammatical switch may seem insignificant, but subconsciously it will affect the way customers see your business.
17. Have a strong, clear brand message
Your website should project the image you want the world to see – and the great news is that through web design you can control that image entirely. In terms of physical design, this means positioning your logo or key message in the top left-hand corner – the part of the screen our eyes are most naturally drawn to.