“Websites promote you 24/7. No employee will do that for you.”
– Paul Cookson
The 15-Second rule states that businesses have less than 15 seconds to catch their first-time website visitors’ attention.
Not having a professional, sleek, elegant, and fully functioning website design will lower your conversion rate as more and more people start bouncing off your website.
Let’s say you are running a paid ad campaign where all of that traffic from social media platforms or Google is redirected to your website.
Obviously, you’d be attracting a huge chunk of traffic towards your website, but if it doesn’t manage to catch your audience’s attention, they’ll simply bounce off.
That’d be a huge waste of your top advertising dollars and efforts.
In today’s digital era, your website is the front desk of your business.
However, while designing a website focused on generating revenue and boosting conversions, most businesses find themselves struggling.
Some simply focus on the look and feel, whereas others care about the functionality.
But the secret to building a highly converting website is creating a design that not only looks good but also focuses on maximizing the conversion rate.
This blog post lists out the five crucial professional website design tips that’ll help you build a sleek and elegant website for your business.
5 Professional Website Design Tips to Unlock a Sleek & Elegant Website
Following are the tips we’ll be looking at:
- Leverage a Visual Hierarchy
- Don’t Choose an Unclear Font
- Make Sure Your Site is Easy to Navigate
- Keep the Pages Uncluttered
- Keep Your Design Simple
Leverage a Visual Hierarchy
Every single page of a website has a visual hierarchy.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, visual hierarchy refers to the size, arrangement, color, and contrast of the visual elements.
It determines the order in which your audience will see them and their relative prominence.
Web designers focus on the visual hierarchy for guiding the website visitors towards the important elements.
The website layout includes sizes, contrast, visuals, and position.
Combining different aspects will multiply the effect.
For instance, it’s not recommended to add a video at the bottom of the page. Not many people like reading too much text at the top of the page.
When used smartly, visual hierarchy will guide your website visitors’ attention via a series of messages, directing them towards the call-to-action.
Focus on the Font
Every single element on your website must be easily accessible and readable by your website visitors. If they find it too difficult to read, then their probability of bouncing off will increase.
Keep things simple and clean.
Hand-drawn scripts, cursive fonts as well as symbols are just too difficult to read.
Making it too hard for your website visitors will turn them off.
That’s because such fonts or elements decrease cognitive fluency.
So, while designing your business’ website, make sure you are using a font that’s clear to read and easy to think about.
Also, using too many font styles and types will make it even worse.
Your visitors may find themselves focusing on the fonts rather than on the message you’re trying to convey.
Your website should be appealing; however, overdoing it isn’t recommended.
So, a good practice is to focus on not more than three fonts on your website.
Make Sure Your Site is Easy to Navigate
Weebly’s chief product officer and co-founder Dan Veltri recommended limiting a website’s top-level navigation menu to only five labeled tabs with different pages organized under them.
Don’t make your website too hard for your visitors to navigate. They should always have a clear way of visiting the page they want to.
Let’s say they want to visit your services section; however, if you don’t have a clear way of taking your users to the “Services” page, then they may get discouraged.
So, while designing your website, make sure that you are making it easy to navigate.
Keep the Pages Uncluttered
Adding a world full of information on a single page is not advisable. Also, you need to make sure that the website design goes well with the information you are providing your users with.
From header to footer, your website needs to be properly structured and has a perfect balance of graphics and text.
It should be built such that your website visitors are easily able to put all the information you’re providing them within context.
Having too much information on a single page may overload their mind, making it extremely difficult to consume new information.
You can take the first step by removing social media widgets from the pages where they aren’t required.
For instance, you should add a Twitter widget on a page where it’s actually required, rather than sticking it on every single page.
Keep Your Design Simple
You can create a truly memorable website and deliver an outstanding customer experience by designing a simple-looking website.
Limit the use of colors, fonts, and animated gifs.
That’s because these elements hold the power to pull your audience’s focus away from what truly matters.
Add bullet points and short paragraphs to make sure that the information you’re adding to your website is easily scannable and likely to be read.
Conclusion
Website design isn’t really rocket science.
But, if you want to actually build a highly converting website, then you need to focus on the tiniest of elements, which may end up ruining your website if not focused on.
Focus on the tips mentioned in this blog post, and you’ll be off to a great start.
And if you need further help, reach out to our experts at RedFoxVisual.
We are one of the leading web design agencies in Boise and would love helping you build a sleek and elegant website for your business.
So, what are you waiting for?
Hire the #1 website design agency in all of Idaho.
