Now more than ever, having a powerful web presence is essential to success because more and more people are using online platforms, like social media and search engines to find what they need and want. Whether you want to boost brand awareness and exceed your last quarter’s sales, excellent web design will make a big difference in attaining whatever business goals you have set. There are simple ways to make a website stand out from the rest that you’ll learn in this comprehensive guide.

Evaluate Your Web Design

Do you feel that your web design is already becoming boring? Are you considering changing the layout or theme of your website? It’s high time to assess your web design. You can survey to get the pulse of online users to find the best ways to improve your website’s look and functionality.

Working with a professional web designer with experience in building and hosting websites is a good idea, from simple ones, e-commerce, or online stores, to complex custom web applications. MWS.dev explains that a good web designer has experience working with bootstrapping entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations, established small and medium-sized businesses, local governments, hospitals, and medical practices. So, it’s crucial to choose a web design agency that is reputable and dependable.

Here are the important things to look for when evaluating your web design:

  • Your Emerging Needs: Are you expanding soon? Do you need to scale your informational website to a full-blown e-commerce store? A major revision might be needed to make your website stand out from your competitors.
  • Web Layout: Is your website responsive even on small screens? It’s essential for a business website to still work at its maximum function regardless of the layout.
  • User Interface: One major factor that affects visitor retention and bounce rate is the user interface. Is your website interface user-friendly? Make sure to place scroll bars and search boxes on appropriate areas to guide your visitors when exploring your website.
  • SEO: Search engine optimization is a critical part of web design, and this aspect is an important consideration to ensure that your website remains visible to more audiences.
  • Theme and Background: Is your company logo still your background, your company colors, and your website theme? If you want to make your website appealing, you have to move away from generic themes and backgrounds. Think outside the box and show your intended audience something they haven’t experienced seeing on a website before, like custom themes.

Revamp Your Content Strategy

You might be used to all-text and fixed image contents for your website for the past couple of years, making it a sort of business card for your target audience to use as a reference. However, it’s not advisable to remain in your comfort zone when it comes to content creation. If you want to make your website stand out, you have to think of ways to make your content more refreshing, unique, and appealing.

Check out these expert web content creation tips:

  • Use Voice-Compatible Content: Have you recently browsed Google or other search engines? Surely, you have encountered questions and answer parts below the search box. You can make your website stand out by creating content that are compatible with voice search, including FAQ, Q&A, and how-to tutorials and guides.
  • Use Infographics: Did you know that visuals help more readers process your web content more efficiently? Instead of lengthy texts, it’s better to create infographics to make your website stand out. Infographics are images that also contain text along with appealing visual graphics. You can use it to cover complex topics more enjoyably. Presenting facts and figures improve your website authority, giving visitors a real reference point.
  • Talk About Emerging Trends: Surely, you know your products and related-topics you usually speak in your web content. Make it different this time by talking about new topics or emerging trends. What’s the latest in the fashion industry as part of the “new normal” due to coronavirus? Are you adopting virtual reality in your marketing campaigns?

Take Advantage of Snippets

A crucial factor for a successful SEO campaign is using rich snippets. While they are not mandatory, snippets make up a new breath of life to Google and other search engine search results, as well as users and site operators. It’s relatively easy to set rich snippets, which can help improve the SEO of your website and generate more traffic coming from search engine results pages or SERPs.

What Is a Normal Snippet? A snippet is what users see on the search engine results page, specifically Google. Each snippet displays the page title in blue and the green URL and page description in black. A snipper provides online users with necessary information about a particular web page before clicking on it.

What Is a Rich Snippet? A rich snippet shows additional information in addition to what a normal snippet displays as mentioned above. You’ll see a rating or picture telling more about the page, providing more info than what is typically needed. Hence, it is termed as “rich snippet.” Also, website owners can provide information on the availability of stock, which entices consumers to click on it.

Check out these tips when creating rich snippets:

  • Determine the best content for your snippets, which may come in various categories, including reviews, events, music, video, businesses, products, recipes, and video.
  • Identify desired properties, such as coding for the item type, item prop, and item scope, as well as the
  • publication date, rating, and author into the coding.
  • Develop a markup code that will enable Google to display all the information for your web content.
  • Use a third-party service or software to make rich snippets. Also, using such a tool can help you show your content on how you want it to appear in Google and other search engines.
  • The last step is testing your rich snippets. Make sure that your snippets appear on search results according to your expectations.

Balance Design Using Negative Space

In any design, utilizing white space or negative space is an essential aspect, making a big difference in your design’s focal point. Having too many design elements can crowd your website, creating eye strain to readers. Negative space is used to align or balance objects in design, making it more appealing to your viewers.

In the user interface (UI) website and mobile app design, white space is a massive factor in navigability and high usability of an interface. With creative imagery using negative space, you can catch people’s attention and better remember your website, which increases return rates or user retention. The staying power of a logo also heavily relies on the proper use of negative space.

The following are helpful tips when using white space:

  • Place Navigation Buttons: While you can fill negative space with big fat navigation buttons, you don’t always have to place something in a white space. Small icons having noticeable text can be used instead to make it sleek and straightforward using nice spacing.
  • Capture Users to Take Action: If you aim to set your viewers on edge and catch their attention to take action, you can use less negative space without straying too far from legibility. Space matters, and reducing too much negative space drastically impacts the efficiency of any design.
  • Remove Borders: Remove unnecessary elements to achieve more negative space. Only use icons, shapes, and borders if they add design value.
  • Enlarge the Background Image: Enlarging the background image creates negative space for text. Also, using a colored background creates lots of space surrounding texts, which still adds an element that captures the attention of readers.
  • Space the Letters: The space in between letters can be condensed or expanded, aligning your texts in blocks for cohesion.
  • Use Padding: If your website design has multiple elements, they will stand out with margins or padding as well as negative space around them.

Focus on Your SEO

Aside from overall aesthetics, it’s important to also focus on your SEO to boost your search engine ranking. While SEO and content marketing goes hand in hand, web design also plays a crucial aspect in creating an SEO optimized web page. Here’s how:

  • Your website has a higher likelihood of appearing on the first pages of search results, getting more clicks, leads, and potential sales by using the right keywords and link building strategies, along with the power of SEO.
  • Videos and images can be SEO optimized by ensuring that their title, meta description, and alt texts use appropriate keywords to be searchable in Google and other search engines.
  • Make your website faster to boost your SEO and user experience, which creates a win-win situation for you and your target audience.

Stay Connected Through Your Web Design

It’s important to stay connected with your audience at all times, wherever they are in the world. That’s why you have to ensure that you have a responsive, intuitive, and fast loading website. Place contact forms and be open to readers’ comments to stay engaged with your audience.

Check out these tips to make your website faster to best stay connected with your audience through your web design:

  • Improve page speed and save your website’s bandwidth by using image online tools or adopt image formats such as JPEG, XR, and WebP to reduce image weight without compromising image quality.
  • Use browsing caching to increase page speed, which also helps reduce the lagging of the serve. It means that the cached version will display whenever a user opens your website, which saves a lot of server requests to improve your site’s load speed.
  • Update or remove outdated or poor plugins because they can slow down the performance of your website dramatically.
  • Compress your content by using online compressor services, which automatically do it on CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

Unleash the Power of Colors

In color psychology, each color is associated with emotions, values, attitudes, and physiological reactions. You can use colors to your website’s most significant advantage as a part of your digital marketing strategy. Make your website stand out using the power of colors through proper web element placement.

Check the practical uses of color psychology in web design:

  • Red: If you want to convey a sense of urgency, such as promoting a clearance sale, you can use red in graphics or ads. This color immediately draws readers’ attention, driving action to complete the sale to avoid missing a great deal. Red is very stimulating, so it’s being used in most sales materials.
  • Black: This color has earned an excellent reputation for glamour, sleekness, elegance, and projecting power. That’s why it’s no wonder why black is commonly used in promoting luxury products.
  • Yellow: Bring optimism and happiness to your readers by using yellow. This color makes a person feel younger, and it’s a bright color usually used in travel, parenting, and wellness websites.
  • Blue: This color is associated with trust, intelligence, security, and dependability. That’s why banks and security services frequently use this color in their logos and websites. Also, blue promotes trust and relaxation, which are essential ingredients in driving conversions or potential sales.
  • White: This color signifies cleanliness, hygiene, and purity. If your website is related to healthcare, using white as a part of your website denotes keeping up with high standards of health.
  • Green: If your website deals with plants, animals, or anything about nature, green is a great color to use. Also, it’s a perfect color base for outdoor and summer products.
  • Orange: Call-to-actions or CTAs are usually presented in orange because it’s an eye-catching color that also promotes cheerful welcoming.

 

Conclusion

There are simple ways you can make your website stand out from your competitors, including evaluating your current web design, using negative space, creating snippets, and developing fresh and helpful web content. It makes sense using the right colors and elements based on the nature of your business and the products and services you’re offering.

Carefully assessing and redesigning your website can benefit your business, making your website a hit to your target audience. While you can design your website on your own, hiring a web designer is a good idea to bring out the best in your website with a professional touch.