- 6 Ways To Make Your Website Design Stand Out For A
- 6 Ways To Make Your Website Design Stand Out As A
- 6 Ways To Make Your Website Design Stand Out Like
You know the importance of having a website to represent yourself or your brand.
To really make your website stand out from the crowd, you may want to get a bit more adventurous and use some additional design elements. There’s a huge library of goodies for you to use at Envato Elements, which range from ready to use stock images for your blog posts (250,000+ fully licensed stock photos), web templates, fonts, backgrounds. Pick a design and use the drag-and-drop editor to add your own images and text or create a contact form. You can make your website as simple or complex as you’d like. Publish your website. Expand your website as you grow. You can add a full online store complete with product listings, coupons, shopping cart, shipping and multiple payment options.
You can establish your voice in your industry through your website’s blog, and you can even connect with your individual readers in the comments section.
All of this, you know. What you’re not quite as sure of? How to make your website stand out.
Don’t worry – you’ve come to the right place.
Keep on reading this post to get access to all the tips and tricks you need when it comes to creating a unique website design.
1. Speed Matters Most
The amount of time, money, and mental effort that you put into learning how to make your website stand out won’t matter at all if no one can access it quickly.
Before you start coming up with templates, designing your homepage, and debating the merits of one font over another? You first need to do everything you can to make sure that your website loads as quickly as possible.
In today’s world of instant gratification, the average website visitor expects your website to completely load in three seconds or under.
So, what can you do to meet those expectations?
First of all, get rid of any pop-up ads and autoplay video options. They’re not just irritating to most visitors, they also slow your website’s speed to a crawl. You should also eliminate any plugins that aren’t really doing much for your site.
Finally, enable browser caching so that repeat visitors can have your site load even faster than before.
2. Keep Your Website Design on Brand
Yes, you want to have a unique website design that excites visitors and clearly separates you from your competitors.
But you also need to be sure that the website design you’ve chosen actually makes sense for your brand. Your website design, perhaps above all else, needs to reinforce your branding strategy as a whole.
This means that your design should perhaps include your company’s colors in text color and background. Your company’s logo should absolutely be on every page of your website.
Even the voice you use to write your website content needs to be consistent with the tone of the rest of your marketing materials. This will make it much easier for your customers to recognize your branding anywhere they see it — whether it’s online or in the “real world.”
3. Ensure It’s Mobile-Friendly
It’s official: more people use their mobile devices to surf the Internet than they do traditional desktop computers.
Is your website keeping up with the times by being mobile-friendly?
If not, making the necessary changes to fix that is perhaps the most valuable of all the website pointers on this list. First of all, test how long your website takes to load completely on a mobile device. Also, see whether or not it loads completely.
How easy is it to navigate through your website using a mobile device? Can your visitors easily click on buttons and scroll through your drop-down menu? Can they access your full site on their mobile devices or only a part of it?
Even details like whether the font is too small to read on a handheld device matter.
Now is also the time to start thinking about whether or not developing an app to accompany your website is the right move.
But even if you do decide to build an app?
You’ll still need to focus on having a mobile-friendly version of your website.
4. Help Your Visitors Along
Making sure that you have a unique website is certainly important — but all of that originality shouldn’t mean you sacrifice ease of navigation.
It’s your job to ensure that visitors can easily and quickly find the specific product page or blog post they’re looking for. There are several things you can do to make that happen.
First, include a site menu at both the top and the bottom of your web pages. Also, include links to your social media profiles on each internal page. Above all, put your company’s contact information on every page of the site itself — remember that not everyone will start their journey at your home page.
You might even consider adding a chatbot to your website. This is a kind of digital customer service professional that guides your visitors through a sales funnel and offers advice on the top products/services for their pain points.
5. Don’t Over-Rely on Trends
6 Ways To Make Your Website Design Stand Out For A
Yes, studying up on the latest design trends is one way to learn how to make your website stand out.
And while using one or two of these trends — like minimalism or custom animation — will intrigue your visitors, using too many of them can cause problems.
You don’t want your website to look dated by next quarter, especially since re-designing your site puts your brand recognition at risk.
Also, if you do look to trends to inform the aesthetic of your site, ensure that they truly fit with the rest of your branding.
For example, if you’re creating a site for your classic, old-school shave barber shop, then using a Victorian font and hand-drawn illustrations will work nicely. But that look wouldn’t work well for a car dealership or a high-powered tech company.
6. Concentrate on Landing Pages
What are the best places for a truly unique website design?
In most cases, it’s your landing pages. These are the internal pages of your website that site visitors see when they click on a link in a search engine or in an article, or even on another site and are re-directed to a specific page of your site.
Remember that the goal of these landing pages isn’t just to make a sale (though of course, that’s certainly an added bonus). It’s really about making sure that your visitors stay on your website for as long as possible.
The longer people spend on your website, the higher your site’s dwell time. The average dwell time directly affects where you fall in the search engine rankings — so you need to do all you can to keep visitors clicking and scrolling.
Things like ease of navigation, well-written/engaging content, customer reviews, and of course, video content, all encourage people to spend more time on your site.
7. Work with a Professional
You want your website to be filled with things that stand out.
But if you’re honest with yourself, you know that you have no clue how to code, how to use software to improve the look of your website, or even what site visitors expect when they see your homepage.
You also don’t have the time to dedicate to dreaming up, perfecting, and then monitoring the effectiveness of your website.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is hire someone to manage your website design for you.
Take a close look at their portfolio of past websites, so that you can be certain that the website design services be able to pull off the look you want.
You should also ask to speak to references of clients they’ve worked with. This way, you can figure out if the designer delivered the work on time if there were any hidden charges, and if the client felt the designer brought their vision to life successfully.
This way, you can focus on the day-to-day of running your business, instead of playing around with templates and trying to get the perfect image size for your homepage.
Now You Know How to Make Your Website Stand Out
Focusing on loading speed, optimizing landing pages, and knowing which trends to try and which ones to ignore are all great ways to learn how to make your website stand out.
Of course, this list is really only a starting point for the things you can do to make your website design even more unique.
Need more advice about how to create landing pages that seriously convert? Want to stay in the know about all the latest trends in digital marketing and SEO?
We’ve got you covered.
In addition to the latest web design advice, we also offer free templates that help you to create the perfect design with just a few clicks of the button. We also offer numerous other services that will make your website the best it can be.
What are you waiting for?
Now is the time to try it out — and to improve your site as a result.
Websites have evolved into something so much more than just text and information on a page. Users today expect your website to entertain them, deliver quality and offer an intuitive, comfortable overall experience. Everything from the aesthetic of your site to the placement of your CTAs can impact how long visitors stay on your page. Fortunately, it is easy to make your website more user-friendly.
In this blog, I’ll show you eight ideas to get you started on making your website more user-friendly.
1. Listen to Your Users
Take the time to ask your regular visitors what they’d like to see on your page. Getting input directly from your target audience will allow you to discover missing elements you might not see on your own. Users often know precisely what they don’t like about a website. It’s your job to take those comments and turn them into positives by fixing any features your visitors dislike.
When you place the user at the core of your design and content, your site will automatically become more user-friendly. A few years ago, ESPN.com asked for input from their regular visitors about what they should add to the redesign of their homepage. They listened, added many of the elements mentioned and saw a 35% increase in revenue. Note how their design features elements someone landing on the page would most want.
2. Speed It Up
Web users expect your site to load at lightning speed, even on mobile devices. About half of them say they expect a website to load within two seconds and will abandon one that doesn’t load after three seconds. Speed indeed does matter when it comes to keeping visitors on your site so they can see if they want to do business with you.
There are some tools out there that will allow you to check your site speed, including Pingdom and Google’s Page Speed Insights. These sites will also give you tips on how to speed up your site. Two simple things you can do to start are checking your server’s speed and optimizing any images.
3. Provide In-Depth Information
When a site visitor lands on your page, they want to get the information they need to make an informed decision about your product or service. If the visitor has to hunt for this information, they may assume you’re hiding something or grow frustrated and leave for a competitor’s website. The more in-depth and accessible you can make information on what you have to offer, the better.
Look at Medical Guardian’s buying guide. They understand someone looking for a medical monitoring device likely has concerns about the effectiveness of the device. After all, you are putting your loved one’s life in their hands. They provide an in-depth buying guide for their customers that answers any questions the consumer might have, including the cost of a medical alert system, the support, the certifications of the monitoring center and even how installation works.
4. Make Navigation Intuitive
When a visitor lands on a website, they often look to the navigation bar to orient themselves with the page. The navigation bar is essential because it follows the site visitor throughout their journey on your site and serves as a tool to go back to the landing page.
At the same time, you need to limit the number of categories in your navigation bar, so it doesn’t become overly bulky—you should also place it in the same location on every page. Conduct some A/B testing with your bar, trying slightly different positions, tab arrangements, and even wording. This will tell you what users prefer and what works best for your site.
5. Choose Color Carefully
Choose the colors for your website carefully. You need a perfect balance between beauty and clarity. Not only does your color palette need to make sense for your industry, but the contrast between the background and text needs to be enough that the visitor can read text easily and not strain the eyes.
Look at the bold colors the Van Gogh Museum uses on its website. The pop of red and the vibrant colors in the painting used for the background draw the eye of the user. Because the industry is art, the site can get a little more creative in the colors they use, combining colors for a palette that a more conservative industry, such as banking, wouldn’t use. This combination works well for this particular site. Although the white text on the partial cream background does not work well, the rest of the site is spot on.
6. Improve Your Site Layout
Keep in mind that many users are now accessing websites via mobile devices. About 80% of internet users own a smartphone and they are spending more and more time accessing the Internet via their phones, especially as data costs come down and unlimited data is the standard.
With that in mind, having a responsive layout becomes even more critical. Does your site look good on both desktop and mobile? It doesn’t necessarily have to look the same. It is more important that mobile users can see things without having to zoom in every few seconds and navigate easily throughout the site.
7. Pay Attention to CTAs
6 Ways To Make Your Website Design Stand Out As A
Do you have strong calls to action (CTAs) on your pages in locations that make sense? Site visitors who decide to buy or register for your newsletter want to know how to take the next step. Make this simple by using a strong CTA that’s easy to locate.
Look at what payment processing platform Square does with their CTA button. They consider both a color that will pop against the background and even the wording of the CTA, which simply reads “sign up with Square.” They have also chosen to place the CTA button above the fold and additional information underneath. This allows the user to find the button from the minute he lands on the page.
8. Beef Up Your Contact Page
If you don’t have a straightforward way for consumers to contact you, you risk losing the trust of those who land on your page. About 51% of people state they believe complete contact information is something many websites are missing. If your contact is simply an email, consider beefing up this information.
The more ways you allow a user to contact you, the better. Consider adding a toll-free number, a live chat option, a knowledge base, and user forum. These factors all add credibility to your site.
Make Your Website User-Friendly
These eight things will instantly make your website more user-friendly, but the key to a site with good UX is to make improvements consistently. Take the time to ask your customers what tools would help them and add those to your site. Remember, the tools that are useful for an ecommerce site will differ from those that are useful for a blog.
6 Ways To Make Your Website Design Stand Out Like
Test everything and try to see your site through the eyes of your target audience. Eventually, your site will become easier to use for your particular site visitors and potentially lead to more sales or new clients.
Are there any user experience must-haves that you feel strongly about? Tell me about it in the comments.
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