How do you make an excellent website? First, you want a website that should represent your business, convert visitors to leads and customers, and rank on the search engine page results. Also, you want a website that people can share across various digital channels.

Achieve these goals by providing your website with engaging content and marketing tools that help you connect with your target market.

You don’t need to spend a fortune or a long time to come up with a successful website. You only need to keep the following design tips in mind.

1. Prepare a web strategy

Planning is important. If you plan to use your website as a lead generator, consider answering the following questions:

  • Who are your target markets?
  • In order of priority, what are your website goals?
  • What are the functions you want your website to have?
  • What information will you give to online visitors?
  • What tools will you use to connect to visitors (e.g. blog articles, landing page or social media links)?
  • How can you measure your website’s success?

By understanding these essential steps, you’ll have a site that can engage every visitor to your site.

2. Create a page hierarchy

Once you have set out your goals and have your website’s blueprint, your next aim is to make your content easy to find. Start by creating a page hierarchy.

First, create a homepage. Then create the top-level pages such as:

  • About Us
  • Products or Services
  • Contact Us
  • Resources
  • Blogs

You’ll also need to provide a user-friendly navigation process like breadcrumb. It helps visitors to easily find your content.

3. Keep the design simple

If your website is too complicated, you’ll have a problem converting leads and customers. Also, too many page elements will only confuse your intended audience. However, if you stick with simple design and text, you’ll be likely to attract more sales. Therefore consider:

Web design specialists agree that designing your pages like a rainbow isn’t a good idea.

4. Don’t forget your call-to-action

In digital marketing, it’s essential to clearly state what you want online visitors to do. You can use call-to-action (CTA) words such as:

  • Subscribe to our blog
  • Book your ticket now
  • Join our email list today
  • Email us to receive your e-book

5. Make your design stand out and responsive

Consider making use of your multimedia assets to enhance your brand. Website designs that can help you stand out include:

  • Accessibility
  • Animation
  • Geometric shapes
  • Minimalism

You’re probably aware that most – if not all – your target audiences are using mobile devices. This is why it’s vital to optimise your website for mobile devices. If you don’t, you’re turning away potential customers.

If you’re not convinced, Google has announced that they have implemented a mobile-first indexing policy. This means that they will prioritise showing mobile-friendly websites.

6. Optimise your organic searches

Google uses a sophisticated algorithm involving more than 200 elements to rank your website. It may seem a long shot for a small business website to rank. However, there are a few search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics you can use to boost your ranking:

  • Content length is essential for SEO. They give search engine crawlers something to review and index. Consider placing at least 300 words per page.
  • You can optimise each page by placing a primary keyword. One of the tools you can use is the Google Keyword Planner.
  • Consider integrating your primary keyword to SEO elements such as metadata, headings, URL, body or alt tags.

7. How to find ‘404’ pages and fix them

These kinds of pages are not good for your SEO campaign since it creates a bad user experience for visitors. Therefore, you need to identify them by using error monitoring tools, which include:

  • External or backlink tools
  • Crawl tools
  • Google search console
  • Web log files/analytical tools

Once you find the 404 pages, there are four options for dealing with them:

  • If visitors land on a 404 page, redirect them to another page
  • If possible, fix the broken link at source
  • Sometimes, the 404 error occurs because the page has been deleted. You can restore it to prevent the error from occurring again or, if the page is no longer needed, set up a redirect.

8. Respect your visitors’ privacy

Privacy policies are disclosures about how your website collects, uses and manage users’ data. It also informs them about how such information is secured, shared or sold.

It’s now vital for your website to have a visitor’s privacy law. You have to because you can receive lawsuits for failing to protect their information. Without such a policy, your website can be penalised.
If your website has an audience in the European Union, you should be aware of their new privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

By making your website GDPR compliant, it can:

  • Protect you from potential lawsuits or fines
  • Establish trust with your target market

Being transparent in how you handle your audience’s data is an excellent way of boosting your conversion or sales.

Conclusion

Well-designed websites don’t have to be expensive. There are web design agencies out there that exceed your expectations while staying within your budget. However, you need to ensure that the website provides decent online traffic. This will help you obtain significant lead conversion and customers for your business. Also, consider hiring a designer who can build in SEO and enhanced user experience to your site.