Opening a business is a daunting task. There are a bunch of different elements to consider, from your finances to your logo, to stock, and the people you will hire to help you out. Today we will address a helpful way to get something important sorted very quickly. Your website design.
There are two things to consider in this step, are you going with a website design company? Or are you going to create the site yourself? The tips to both will be covered below.
So, how do you choose the ideal website design for your business? The whole idea is a process that firstly involves completing research. Looking at the website designs that your competitors use. The things to look out for when you are choosing designs is what overall look and feel resonates with you, what colours and tones suit you best, and figuring out how your logo fits into all of it.
Getting a website design company involved helps with this process immensely as you can use simple templates that help you get a great initial look and feel. However, getting professionals means that they run with the content you are providing, but they’re also going to complete any specialised requirements using plugins and in some instances completing coding to get you the integration you need.
If your business needs specialised subscription packages, or booking requirements, getting a website design company is a great option to help get those needs met, the design of your site will also be optimised surrounding these specialised features that may mess with the template.
Choosing the ideal website design also means making decisions on design based around certain elements. Emotion. This is about sparking interest in your website users. It is about getting the first thing that people see on your website to be powerful, engaging and your most important selling point. Make an impact with emotions in mind. How does it feel to see your first page? If you’re not feeling engaged about your industry by the first image, then it is time to go back to the drawing board.
Design with a story in mind. If you do this, you can capture audiences’ attentions and keep them on your website for longer periods. This increases the likelihoods of increasing your conversions. The concept here is about incentivising people who are viewing your site to look into new pages. If you are selling a product, having the images and the more need-to-know images means that people are incentivised to visit other pages. This helps you think about your site in a holistic way, every page will be useful to your customers. At the end of the day though, when communicating storytelling can also mean being particular about the fonts, the icons the call-to-action buttons, and your tone and word choices.
If you’re selling a whole host of products, or just want to lead people through the stories that you’ve crafted in a particular way, website design with navigation in mind is something to consider. Making sure that your content can flow easily from one page to the next. You can also provide images to describe the kinds of pages that people may search for. For instance, Kitchenaid designs their website in a way that instructs people via images of their items, which lead to larger menus with options for kettles or sinks, or bowls. However having the image initially is such a great way to show people where they are headed, and how they can find what they are looking for.
Designing your website with accessibility in mind is going to be very important for people who may work in areas that have customers that may need help viewing in regular ways. A quick example that illustrates this point is that you can add alt-text to all your images, that way, screen readers can speak the text to visually impaired individuals. To accommodate people who may have colour blindness you can also use symbols and colours to convey a message. Being inclusive with your website design is going to be very important if people with disabilities require to use your site effectively.
Designing for shopping is also one last element that will help you out if you have an e-commerce site. If people are shopping they tend to want to have a great experience, and having menus that are easy to navigate, images that stand out against a background, and making sure that categories are clearly defined and the user experience is able to be used easily by a person who has never seen your site before.
To sum up, having the ideal website design for your business is complicated. There are a multitude of factors to bear in mind, and learning about them can leave you a little confused on how to start. But what we know now is that we need to look up references and examples that we like, and make sure that we have a powerful hook to keep people on the site through designing with emotion. We need to take people on a journey of your business and get them seeing other pages too through storytelling. We want to keep people clicking from page to page easily by designing with navigation in mind. We want anyone to be able to use our site with confidence by designing it accessibly. We finally want people to view products that you might be selling in an easy to find way.
Overall, these tasks get accomplished easily if you hire a website design company. If you are doing it all by yourself, you will need to learn how to implement these design languages, and then make sure that you are implementing them correctly. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it is important that you recognise the workload will be significantly more time-consuming.
Now that we are here, we hope that your ideal website design can be achieved easily, and the references and tonality you have in mind works out well for your developmental process.