In the not-so-distant past, many believed web design was all about simply how a website appeared on-screen and nothing more. However, with Google’s pursuit of optimal user experiences for those who use its search engine, it quickly becomes clear that appearance alone will do little to help a website’s rankings and subsequent performance.
The homepage is arguably the most important of all the pages within a website that web designers create. Given that most visitors to a business website land on the homepage first, this page has the job of instantly connecting and engaging with visitors. If it does so, it will keep those visitors on the site, hopefully with them then taking the desired action. If not, they will click away almost immediately and likely never return. With this in mind, website owners must ensure that when their business website is being designed, they know what elements should be included on the homepage to maximise visitor engagement. To help them, we have selected some of the most effective ways of doing so in the seven tips outlined below. Make It Obvious What Your Website Is About Before they land on your website, visitors will have clicked on a link on another website, such as social media, an online business directory, or even a paid ad. When they do so, they will have an expectation of your website, so the homepage must immediately make it clear what your website is about.
If a new website is being created, there are several objectives that the web design must meet. Some are relatively easy to achieve and are obvious the second you land on a website designed professionally. A prime example is the objective of making the website easy to navigate to provide the best possible user experience, which is achieved via the menu on the home page. For Users, For SEO, Or Both? Many objectives of a website are related to user experiences, such as having high-quality content, a visually appealing appearance, and the functionality of the website being fit for purpose in the sense that everything on the website works as it should. Other objectives within a website’s design will specifically relate to SEO and the goal of the website being ranked highly on search engines, with the prime one being Google. To hopefully encourage Google to rank a website highly, onsite SEO, such as metadata, internal linking, and effective keyword use throughout the content, will all help. There are also some objectives that web designers will be expected to enable when creating a website that satisfies both the desire for a good user experience and SEO. Here, there is a crossover because many ways you create great user experience are integral to optimising a website to satisfy Google’s ranking factors. Fast Versus Slow Page Load Speed One such factor is page load speed, which is how quickly any page within a website opens when someone clicks on it. One of two things is likely to happen depending on page load speed. The first is negative, where the website is poorly designed, and its pages take too much time to open. It can be regarded as slow, even if that is two or three seconds. Bear in mind modern internet users expect instant results, so when they click on any web page, they expect to see it open in the blink of an eye. If you have slow-loading website pages, the problem is that visitors will immediately click away. On one level, that is a potential customer you have lost, who likely never returns, but it gets worse. Google can identify how long web pages take to open and measure how long someone remains on a web page. Slow-loading pages and someone clicking away almost immediately are red flags to Google, and if repeated red flags occur due to slow load speeds, then the result is Google lowers that website’s ranking.
One of the types of content that is extremely effective in helping with website SEO in the pursuit of better search engine rankings is blog posts. You can create a blog post on any subject, it can be as long or as short as you wish, and if optimised correctly, it can help boost rankings on search engines. Although writing a blog post is not difficult, if it is to be used as part of an SEO campaign, it requires more than just tapping the words on a keyboard. There are several ways to ensure that the published blog post is not only an excellent piece of content worth reading but also SEO friendly and thus contributes positively to helping the website it is published on rank higher on search engines. Here are ten of those ways. Plan Every Blog Post Properly: This relates to not just thinking about what you are going to write about, important though that is. It is also about planning the SEO aspects of your blog post, such as what keywords you are going to use, where you are going to include them, and also if there is going to be a call to action within your blog post to encourage readers to take action once they have read it. Create A Structure For Each Blog Post: Just as your entire website should have a site structure, your blog posts should also have a structure that is both reader-friendly and SEO-friendly. Specifics related to the structure include the blog post’s introduction, the main body of the blog post, sub-sections, and the conclusion or call to action if there is one. Use Paragraphs And Headings Effectively: The key here is ‘effectively’ as it is true that most people include paragraphs and headings in their blog posts. To make paragraphs effective, consider their length while trying not to make them too long, and ensure each paragraph has an identifiable subject or idea. For headings, make sure they adhere to your blog post’s structure, are relatively short, and most importantly, include keywords in them. Use Transitional Words: As you write, do as much as you can to add structure to your blog post and help readers scan through and still understand how each sentence or paragraph relates to the next one. This is achieved using transitional words, some of which are ‘for example’, ‘however’, ‘as such’, and ‘similarly’, to name but four.
Whenever web designers are hired by business clients, one of the first things that they request is a website design brief. A website design brief is what clients need to create so that the web designer knows what the client is looking for and expects from their new website. However, given that a website design brief is something that a business owner might only ever consider once or twice at most, it is fair to say not every website design brief achieves its objective. By that, we do not mean that the website fails, but rather that the website design brief fails to properly outline the client’s wishes. It is akin to a construction company being given the job of designing and building a house but the specifications for that house are vague and give them little upon which to base the house’s dimensions, features, or construction materials. As for designing and creating a website, a web designer could quite easily do so with zero guidelines and simply build a website that suits them. However, the website in question here is for a business and thus it needs to align with that business’s objectives. For that to occur the business owner needs to create a website design brief so that the web designer has a conceptual foundation and is aware of what the website’s objectives should be. Below we have outlined five simple steps to ensure that the website design brief you provide to your web designer is sufficiently effective that it allows the web designer to design and create the desired website. Give Plenty Of Insights Into Your Business Designing and creating websites is about more than just code and programming, so when web designers build websites for businesses the more they know about a business’s history, its owners, its employees, its challenges, and achievements, the better their feel will be for exactly what the website should look like.
