Your website is crucial for establishing your brand and your company’s credibility. At least 46% of internet users say the number one way they evaluate a company’s credibility is the professionalism of their web design. You have a lot of web design options that can make your website look great.
- Get a logo professionally designed by an expert. You need to have a professional looking logo for your company. This is a great thing for your business to invest in anyway as it can be used on all of your marketing and press materials. Use it all over your website and link the image back to your homepage wherever you use it. Make the image a high resolution for your website. Work with your website design company to put this in the upper left corner of all of the pages on your website. This gives your visitors a great way to navigate through your website.
- Make your navigation intuitive. You have a lot of web design options available. Making your site as easy as possible for people to navigate is something every custom web development company should be able to do. If your navigation is hard to work out or confusing in any way, visitors to your website will not spend time trying to figure out how to work through it. They will just go to a different site for what they need. Two things you need to do are add a top level navigation bar to the top of the page and a secondary navigation on the left side of your page. The secondary navigation area is often called a sidebar. People are used to looking at webpages that are designed this way. If you want to have other information on your page, you can user the footer area at the bottom.
- Simplicity is your friend. You do not want there to be a lot of stuff cluttering up your website. In the first place, this may make it take longer to load. The average internet user will leave a page and go ti a different one if the page takes more than three seconds to load. When you have too many images or too busy a background, you end up making it hard to focus on the important message for your web design. Again, you have a lot of web design options, you need to simplify the look and feel of your website. Make your messages short and sweet. When you work on your content, make the paragraphs be short.
- Make sure of “white space.” Some people and companies think they have to cram as much information, text and images onto their website as they possibly can. This is a mistake. Leaving space around your content and images gives people more of a chance to take in everything on your webpage. This also lets people focus on the areas and messages that you want them to pay attention to.
- Have s professional handle your photography. It is possible to get free photos on line but you can use the photos you have taken of your company or your products for a lot of things. It is not hard for visitors to your website to tell the difference between photos that were taken for you and those that are generic images that were taken from a free website. You will get a lot more mileage out of the professionally done photos.
- Work with your custom web design firm to make it look great on mobile devices. When you are looking at your various web design options, one of the more important things you need to do is make sure it looks good on mobile devices. More and more people are accessing the internet from their mobile devices such as smart phones. This is especially important when you have a local business such as a restaurant. You can greatly increase your sales and customer base when you have a website that loads rapidly and looks very good when viewed from a mobile device.
Developing the right website for your business is crucial to building your brand and growing your customer base. The right web design can really do wonders for your brand.