We often think of fresh starts or making resolutions for ourselves at this time of year, such as setting new business targets or achieving higher sales. But what if your website design is crying out for a fresh start itself? If your website is in need of a new lick of paint for 2012, then perhaps you should consider the following web design basics:
Communicate, don’t decorate
Make sure your website says what it needs to as accurately as possible. Pay attention to your copywriting. Whilst a website needs to be well designed, visitors to your site aren’t coming for the aesthetics alone. Order your content, spend time on creating accurate information and make the words on your website count.
Functionality vs Originality
Everyone wants their website to stand out from the crowd, but this should never be at the expense of simple usability. Functional design will outlast visual fads.
SEO Success
Your website needs to find its way onto search engine results. It’s that simple. But implementing a successful SEO campaign needs forethought and attention to detail. There’s a lot of competition to rank highly on results pages, so you need to be specific. For example, the phrase ‘web design’ is going to return an awful lot of results – how well do you think your company will do in such a random selection? But ‘web design Tewkesbury’ narrows the field and is more specific to your target audience – making it doubly effective.
No need to reinvent the wheel
Just because your website looks a little ‘last year’, doesn’t mean a complete overhaul is in order. Consider what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to how you can improve your website from your customer’s perspective. ‘Same site, different colour’ is unlikely to win praise. Reorder, rewrite and rearrange.
Branch out
How can your make your website better? By ticking all the boxes. Would your customers benefit from a video demonstration of your product? Then why aren’t you on YouTube? Would your customers like to be kept up to date on what’s happening with your company? Then why don’t you have a newsletter? Customers expect more than a bog standard website. If they are on Twitter, then you should be too.
On the move
Think about how you access the internet these days. Chances are you have a smartphones, iPad or netbook that you use for a fair bit of browsing. So of you do, then your customers do too! Your web design needs to address each medium that it can be viewed on – meaning that previous staples such as mouse hovering need to be rethought.
Out with the old
You can be ruthless. Just because you’d grown attached to the way your website looks, doesn’t mean your customers will miss it too. A dynamic, forward-thinking company doesn’t need a stale website. Fresh eyes and new innovations can go a long way to propelling your website to success in the coming years.
