Web design can definitely be a bit challenging if you are unsure what makes a website top notch. There are a lot of elements to a successful website, like user experience (UX) and user interface (UI). Great web design comes down to providing an accessible site that appeals to site visitors in a very short amount of time. But once you capture a visitor’s attention, they are likely to engage with your website and potentially convert.
“It only takes a person 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) to form an opinion about your website,” Bryant Chou explained in a Forbes article. “For some, this first impression of your website is the only impression they’ll ever form about your business.”
So how do you make that lasting impression? The following insight about web design in this ever-shifting era of digital can assist you in making sure your corporate website is top-notch, creating a positive brand message, and converts website visitors into quality leads.
Here is our 5-point corporate web design checklist to stay ahead of your corporate competition. Let’s dive in!
1. Take Branding Serious and Incorporate it into Your Corporate Website Perfectly
Branding is critical to the success and growth of your company. However, if branding is fragmented on your website, the whole web design is thrown off. This makes your site look clunky and downright confusing.
To avoid this, make branding a priority with a very consistent brand message, look, and feel throughout the entire site. This means using brand colors, font, header guidelines, icons, images, videos, and more. If you have a brand book, break it out and make it part of your web design process.
2. Website Load Speed is Critical
Your corporate website may be online and ready to be viewed by the masses, but if the website is not highly accessible to users, you may as well not have a corporate site at all. Did you know that a user will abandon a site that doesn’t load in three seconds or less? This makes website load speed very important to your overall web design strategy.
You may be thinking, “What do page load speed and web design have in common?” The answer is — everything! The way you design your site, like inserting images and injecting new code can slow down your website significantly. A few page speed tips include, use a content delivery network (CDN), compress images, get rid of unnecessary code, and review website plugins.
3. Ensure Your Corporate Website is Mobile Friendly
After Google launched the mobile first index, all websites need to be mobile friendly and ready. This is vital to keeping your corporate website a step ahead of your competitors, whether it is higher search engine rankings, or better accessibility and user experience. Did you know that nearly 80 percent of site visitors will abandon a non-mobile friendly site? That means 80 percent less potential conversions.
4. Have Plenty of Conversion Minded Call to Action (CTA) Buttons
The first goal is to attract visitors to your corporate website, keep them engaged with your content with a powerful user experience via desktop and mobile, and then convert them. Conversions can be capturing emails for lead generation campaigns, requesting a demo, or converting visitors into a customer directly from your site.
Call to Action (CTA) buttons can make all of the above happen. Your CTAs need to be throughout your site and be very clear and concise.It may be a journey you want to lead your website visitors on to take a specific end action, or simply convert immediately from your corporate site’s home page. When you choose the conversion goals that are important to you (whatever they may be), you need to make sure your CTA buttons are properly implemented on your website, or you might not be getting as much conversion as you should. Your CTA buttons need to capture the attention of your website visitors and they need to have a clear and concise message. Providing your potential customers with a button that meets all of their needs in as few words as possible is the goal here. If you are offering a free trial for your product, creating a CTA button that has a unique colour that stands out from the rest of the page, with the text “Get Your Free Trial” will definitely grab the attention of your website visitors. It’s also very important to note that the placement on the web page of your CTA button plays a significant role in its success. Placing it in a place that is clearly visible and grabs the attention of people scrolling through the page will have more impact than just placing the button wherever you see the chance for it. Creating well designed CTA buttons that actually convert visitors into potential customers is not an easy thing to do, and more importantly, it is very time-consuming. That’s why many business owners decide to go with a custom web design and development instead of testing all of the possible choices and measuring which of them work the best.
5. Incorporate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into Your Corporate Web Design
Corporate web design isn’t always just about design. There are elements of optimization that are needed in order to ensure your website is highly visible online. Utilizing keywords, adding video content that is paired with your company YouTube channel and other social networks, and much more. SEO is important and should be part of your web design strategy every step of the way.
In Conclusion . . .
The above 5-point web design checklist is not the end-all when it comes to creating or redesigning your corporate website. They are simply among the top web design musts you should have at the forefront of your mind while designing or managing the design project. What is your top web design tip? We want to hear from you.