Want to plan your website design for sales? Wondering what design tips help with sales? Read our blog to get you planning underway.
Responsive, Responsive, Responsive
An ever growing necessity. A good question to start with is:
What is the cost to your business of your website not being responsive?
There is the option of creating two sites – a mobile friendly version and a desk-top version. But, as you can imagine, this creates complications of having two sites – more confusion, more time in updating both versions, more expense in maintaining two sites.
If your website could do with updating to a responsive design, the benefits to your business are many fold, including loading speed and search engine ranking.
Navigation
Your website should make it easy for your existing customers and new ones to find information/products/contact details as quickly as possible.
There are (and always will be) trends for fancy navigation design, but most visitors will expect to see a navigational menu in key places. Have you ever been browsing, found a site and then left it, as you can’t see what you’re looking for? Humm, annoying isn’t it?
Too much animation or flash can be distracting and flash also slows down the loading time and isn’t great for SEO.
Quality Images/Video
Using quality images/video is a great way to enhance your brand and make it memorable. This is particularly true in heading or banner images – often the first thing you see when the home page loads up (apart from clear and easy to find navigation!).
Stock images have their place, used sparingly and not all of us can afford a photographer or are good at photography ourselves. If you do use stock photos, then try and think around the subject, rather than literally. How about developing a house style – using either photo literal, abstract, vectors, illustrations. Your clients will appreciate your brand consistency and gives your company a stylish presence.
Try using images from your office, workshop, events, your office building or details of them that will bring personality and individuality to your website images. There are often little gems of detail that when used, make your brand more memorable.
Professional photography does stand-out and gives you a visual edge and they can help advise on and capture your products and services. It can be the case that someone looking in at your business sees gems that you don’t – being so close to the coal face!
Accents, Colour and Fonts
Your best friend is white space. On your web pages, white space gives your content (both written, images, videos, calls to action etc..) room to breathe. Keeping a primary colour, secondary and accent colours creates harmony and allows your content to stand out. Carry your well planned colour palette out across your social media and other marketing material. If you go for a new website colour palette, it’s best to update the rest of your materials at the same time.
Fonts should match or complement your website colour palette – thinking about curve, strength, size, thickness, slant etc…
We’ve listed some blogs you might like to subscribe to for inspiration
Responsive Test Tool – if you’re unsure if your site is responsive, try this tool
Shutterstock blog – for colour inspriation
Fontsmith – for browsing fonts
Google Fonts – for browsing fonts
What some help with updating your website for a fresh 2016? Get in touch!
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