For many modern consumers, the shopping journey begins on the internet rather than a store. In fact, more than 87% of shoppers search for products online before buying them, regardless of whether that’s from the internet or an in-person store. Because of that, you want to bolster your online presence as much as possible. Part of that is through unique website design ideas. Your web design is the first impression consumers will have of your business. Having a good design not only makes your website more engaging but is also essential for increasing online sales. In this post, we’ll explain how web design impacts business and offer tips to help you build a conversion-focused website.
What is Web Design?
Before solidifying your website design ideas, you have to understand the fundamentals of design. Many people think of web design as colors, fonts, and layouts that go into making your web page. But, there’s actually a lot more to it than just that. In addition to content organization and color schemes, web design incorporates the site’s functionality and performance. A well designed site will not only look visually appealing, it will run smoothly to give the user a good experience while using it. In short, this is referred to as UX, and it’s a crucial part of web design that often gets overlooked.
UX Basics
When working out your website design ideas, always bring the user’s experience into consideration. Put simply, you want your customers to be able to easily work through your site content. And for that, you also want to make sure that your site’s code is of high quality. Lower quality code runs the risk of slowing your site down, which can ruin the user experience. Also consider responsive design, or scaling, so that your site will appear great on desktop and mobile devices. There’s a lot to consider that goes beyond “how does my site look?” if you want to increase your online sales
Why Web Design Matters
As for why having quality website design ideas matters, it has the potential to directly make or break your business. It takes visitors only 50 milliseconds to form a first impression of your website. That first impression is almost always based purely on design. It doesn’t matter if the functionality or what you offer is amazing, 75% of consumers will judge you on looks alone. First impressions matter. If you don’t have a good one, it’s unlikely customers will stick around when they can simply go to another site that does make a good first impression.
How Good Web Design Improves Your Sales
Great website design ideas can directly increase your online sales in the following ways:
Boost User Engagement
People in the digital age have short attention spans. They tend to get bored easily if what they’re looking at isn’t visually appealing. In fact, 38% of visitors will stop using your site altogether if they find it unattractive. For people to use your site the way you want them to, it needs to look good. There’s a reason Apple has been at the forefront of the tech industry for years. They absolutely nailed their visual aesthetic and have translated it well to all their products. Take some inspiration (without stealing) from Apple for your website design ideas.
Improve Organic Rankings
Having good user engagement will also directly influence your ranking in Google and other search engines, another great way of increasing online sales. Google will crawl your site and see that users are interacting with it for longer periods as they stay engaged, and give your site more authority. With that increased authority, Google will start ranking you higher on search results. That will bring much more organic traffic to your site as people look for where to buy things in your industry. A lot of people research where to buy products through Google, so this can have a huge impact on attracting customers.
Enhance Brand Trust
Having great website design ideas also enhances the amount of trust you instill within your visitors. Essentially, people will perceive a better looking site as more professional, and think the business is more trustworthy because of it. This gives your business credibility which can be a huge factor for driving sales. Trust is actually the second most important factor after price for consumers’ buying decisions. So, having a better looking site will not only be pleasing to the eye, it gives a boost to the way your company is perceived throughout the industry.
Differentiate Your Brand
Having unique website design ideas can be crucial to standing out from the competition and increasing online sales because of it. In a market oversaturated with many different providers of nearly any product you can think of thanks to the internet, being able to stand out is vital to long term success. If you look like any other generic Shopify site, people may appreciate the familiarity, but won’t think of you any differently than the hundreds of other sites they could shop at. Take a distinct approach to your web design and people will remember your business specifically, and be more likely to return in the future.
Expand Your Business Reach
A not-often discussed aspect of website design ideas is accessibility concerns. Having a site that abides by ADA standards of accessibility will have a much larger reach than those that don’t. Not everyone can surf the web like a pro, and accessibility options ensure everyone can look through your content, giving you a much wider reach. It also further improves your credibility, as users will appreciate the extra thought and effort that went into making your site accessible. The best part: you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to get this right. Simply following the guidelines already in place will be a surefire way to make your site accessible and attract more users.
How to Build a Conversion-Focused Website
These are the guidelines to follow for your website design ideas to ensure you increase online sales.
1. Optimize Your Website to Load Faster
A fast website is necessary in the digital age. People expect their content to get to them quickly. When it doesn’t, they get impatient and you risk losing them. If your website hits 4 seconds of loading time, you’ve already lost 25% of your potential viewers.
A big factor that often holds back sites is their pictures and videos. Having picture-heavy sites can be great for the visual appeal of your site, but it will drag at slower internet speeds. To fix this, reduce the resolution to an acceptable degree and convert your images to WEBM format. Alternatively, consider incorporating more vector graphics in your website design ideas over rasterized graphics.
2. Provide Seamless Navigation
A website should have a simple navigation scheme where users will have no trouble finding their way around. For starters, make sure your NavBar is prominent and has easy links across your site. For mobile, turn it into a collapsible vertical NavBar instead so it will work well in portrait view. From there, make sure products can easily direct users to the shopping cart when they want to buy or link to other helpful pages. If you’re having trouble with your site’s navigation, look at your sitemap and ask yourself if it’s possible to get from one point to another by only clicking on links on the site. If you can’t, rethink your website design ideas.
3. High-Quality Visuals and Imagery
If increasing online sales is your goal, you need to make sure that your site isn’t one big wall of text. That’s unappealing to look at and people won’t want to read through it all. Use images wherever possible to boost the visual profile of your site. But remember to keep them responsive so they won’t drag down your site’s performance too much.
4. Make Your Calls to Action Stand Out
As part of your website design ideas, you need to make sure that calls to action are clearly highlighted and easy for people to read. A call to action is the last sentence of any important copy that invites customers to view/buy your products or advertises a key selling point of your business. It encourages people to act rather than simply perusing the site and leaving. It seems silly, but if people don’t see them, your conversion rates go way down. You want them to be clear, both visually and rhetorically, so visitors will feel inclined to buy products from your site.
5. Include Social Proof
Sometime’s a company’s website design ideas and words aren’t enough to convince customers. They want the opinion of other people like them who can give them a recommendation that counts. So, to increase online sales, you want to give as much social proof as you can. In other words, show how other people are appreciating your products. The primary way to do this is with reviews. Customers love reading through reviews to get a judgement on their order. Another possibility is case studies of your products. Either way, show people real examples of your products in action.
6. Add White Space
White space for website design ideas refers to any space not occupied by a picture or text on your site. It’s important to keep the site from bombarding visitors with too much at once. There’s a limit to how much people can take in at one time. Filling it to the brim with content looks too busy. Visitors will never be able to pick apart what’s important and what isn’t. A good rule of them is to include at least 20 pixels of empty space between important sections so they have room to stand out.
7. Build Responsively
Responsiveness for website design ideas means building a site that will automatically scale depending on the size of the screen. That way, you build a site that will automatically render itself properly whether it’s on a large desktop monitor or a small phone. More and more people are shopping with their phones. Building responsively allows you to cater to every possible device. This is key to increasing online sales in a world that skews more and more to mobile.
8. Short and Simple Contact Forms
A big component of your website design ideas should be concision, particularly for contact forms. A contact form is any page that gives visitors methods for contacting you. You never want to over explain yourself during this section. If you do that, you may just end up confusing visitors or discouraging them from contacting you altogether. Give your info or contact form and leave it at that.
9. Display Trust Symbols
Trust symbols for your website design ideas simply mean any visual indicators that your site is reputable and should be trusted. Often these will be in the form of badges that show that your site is certified or legal. If you use Shopify for your web platform, you can find many trust symbols provided by them. If not, simply provide industry indicators that your site is worth visitors’ time.
10. Regular Audits
Coming up with website design ideas isn’t something you do once and then forget about. If you want to keep increasing online sales, you need to consistently audit your content to find what works and what needs to be changed. Keep your mind open to new possibilities for your site. Use Google Analytics to track the current statistics of your site to see what isn’t working. And keep revisiting the above steps so you can ensure your site will stay appealing in the future.
Conclusion
Your website design ideas play a huge role in your potential sales. Having an appealing and efficient web design is necessary to make your brand competitive and stand out within the industry. To succeed means putting in as much effort and creativity as necessary. If you feel like your company isn’t up to the task, don’t worry. You can enlist the services of a web design agency. We have rankings of the best ones around here. Or, look around the site for more web design info. At BestWEB, you can make your web design efforts simple.