Marketing

Why Is Site Design So Important?

A well-designed webpage is an excellent addition to any business. It looks nice, respectably presents your brand, and encourages customer participation. If you’re promoting your website using SEO, you can’t overlook the essentials of a sleek, modern, and intuitive site design.

Site design is important to your website for two main reasons:

1. Search engines favor well-designed sites in search results.
2. Well-designed sites provide better user experiences for your visitors.

With those ideas in mind, let’s look at some elements involved in creating a high-quality, well-designed website that both Google and users will like.

Search engines

It’s clear that search engines like good-looking sites. But how do you know Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and all the others will like yours specifically? In general, you can follow a few simple rules to make sure your website is up to par for search engines.

First, make sure that the coding for your website is clean — that is, check that every tag and word serves a purpose. If you have any meaningless code or text, remove it. Extra code means it takes longer for search engines to read and contextualize your site, and it can negatively impact your rankings by taking longer to load.

Next, ensure every page on your site is linked to another page on your site with a breadcrumb or navigation bar. Search engines use links like bridges, and they can only cross to other pages if they’re all connected. If you have any pages that aren’t linked at all (called “orphans”), connect them right away so Google can index your website properly.

Last, make sure your website is compatible with as many screen sizes as possible. This kind of programming is called responsive design, and it’s now a factor that Google considers when it crawls websites. Google can tell if your site will display well on mobile devices — make sure yours is compatible.

User experience

Now that search engines are showing your website, you have to make sure your site’s visitors have a positive experience. Fortunately, following the previous steps also helps create a user-friendly website. But there are a couple of other factors you need to consider for site visitors.

Site visitors like it when you keep your page, text, and concepts simple. If your site is easy on the eyes and quick to navigate, your users will happily find what they want. Using jumbled text, crowded advertising, and other poor design choices can make your site appear spammy and unreliable.

Also, people like whitespace. It may sound counter-intuitive — you’re trying to inform and convert potential customers, after all — but whitespace helps break up text and make it more readable. It also organizes your graphics, paragraphs, sidebars, navigation menus, and other on-page elements.

Last, you have to make it exceptionally easy for site visitors to convert into paying customers. Whether you do this by asking for their email addresses or link them to secure checkout, the whole process should include as few clicks, screens, and load times as possible. Whenever you add another click, you risk losing a conversion.

When you optimize your site for both search engines and users, you create a winning combination that can help boost your site rankings and your conversions. With these concepts in mind — plus other SEO essentials — you can create a website that both search engines and users will enjoy.

If you’re looking for more ways to optimize your website, simply fill out the form below. You can also check out this article for more tips on how to get started with a website redesign! We’ll contact you to determine your site’s needs and how to take it to the next level of quality!

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