What makes a good web page design?

Whether you’re about to start designing a brand new site, or you are planning to redesign your current site, it’s a good idea to pay some attention to your web page design.

Design is more than just nice colours and images; it’s about how your site works and how easy it is for your customers to find what they are looking for. The better your site’s user experience (or UX), the more likely it will be successful. Global market research company Forrester found that well-designed UX could improve a website’s conversion rates by as much as 400%.

Here are some ways to ensure your website design engages your customers and doesn’t drive them away.

It needs to be responsive

A responsive website automatically scales to the screen size and shape on which it’s displayed. About half of all internet traffic in 2021 came from mobile devices, so if your website isn’t responsive, you could be losing half of your potential business. It’s also important to note that Google ranks responsive sites higher in searches.

It should be easy to navigate

Make it easy for your customer to find what they are looking for. Keep your menu layout simple and uncluttered, and have a good search function in an obvious spot. Your page layout should be intuitive and efficient. A UX rule-of-thumb suggests that a customer should be able to get to any page within your site in no more than three clicks, and there should be no broken links.

It should be pleasing to the eye

Don’t bombard your visitors with a riot of bright colours. It’s best to use a small range of complementary colours and use your main colour for the important parts of the page, like your headings, to draw the eye automatically. Plenty of white space is important, too, to avoid visual clutter. Likewise, limit the number of distracting features like pop-ups, animated graphics and auto-playing video.

Your content should match your customers’ needs

Make sure your content is relevant to your site. Include helpful content that will answer your customers’ questions about your products or services clearly and succinctly. Don’t frustrate them by making them hunt for all the information they need to reach a purchasing decision. Also, try to avoid huge walls of text – if you need to relay a lot of information, break it up with plenty of sub-headings, paragraphs, and images.

It should load quickly

Research suggests that if your site hasn’t loaded within one to two seconds, a third of your visitors will give up and go elsewhere. While page loading speed is somewhat dependent on your web host, you can help to improve it with good site design, such as optimising your images and videos, ensuring your code is clean, and removing unnecessary plugins.

If you would like to improve your website’s design, we can help. Get in touch to learn more about creating or improving your small business website.