Designing a professional website is not an easy task. With so much online competition for businesses, it is important to pay close attention to detail and enable your business to stand out from the crowd.
1. Your website needs to be mobile friendly
According to Statista, a whopping 82.3% of the population in Singapore are smartphone users which make it the leading country for the use and engagement of smartphones.
A study shows that Singaporeans used their smartphones to access a search engine, engaging on social media and watching videos online. Your website and digital marketing strategy has to serve the mobile users in order to stay ahead of the competition. Keeping your website design clean and simple as well as using relevant icons will allow mobile users to navigate easily.
2. Colour palette
This is the core of your brand identity and website style. Colour schemes and usage are very important when it comes to modern web design. A strong colour palette will help create cohesiveness between everything your business puts out. Check out famous sites like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. You won’t find a rainbow of colours, just one background colour (white or black) and one major accent colour. The idea here is to simplify your site so it is easier to focus on your products or services.
3. Plenty of “empty” space
Empty space acts as a buffer between all the elements on your page, including copy, sidebar, margins, etc. It is often used to balance elements on a page by creating a natural flow for the user to navigate through the content.
Utilizing empty space throughout your website will give all your elements enough room. If your website is crowded, it can be very hard to capture the attention of your visitors’ eye.
Remember, the main objective of your website is to ensure visitors are able to navigate and see your information quickly.
4. Striking call to action (CTA)
Converting visitors into leads and customers is also very important to modern website design. Include relevant CTA in your website as a tool to guide the consumer into your sales funnel. That being said, your call to action button has got to be easy to find.
Also, it will be great if your CTA is able to reflect a benefit instead of an action. For example, instead of writing your CTA as “Enquire” you can write “Get Free Consultation” or instead of “Request” you can write it as “Join the Fun”. This way your prospects will view that they are getting something in return.
Remember to cater your CTA for mobile users as well!
5. Website Speed optimization
It is crucial to keep your website’s bounce rate low. Optimizing your website’s loading speed can make a huge difference and minimize the chance of your visitors feeling frustrated and searching elsewhere.
Some ways to go about doing it:
– Removing any nonessential videos, images or other large documents that may be taking time to load.
– Compress images down for website quality to reduce the time it takes to load large images.
– Use a Content distribution networks (CDNs), also called content delivery networks, are networks of servers that are used to distribute the load of delivering content.
– Utilize browser caching to store cached versions of static resources. This can speed up your page greatly.
– Optimize your website for other devices such as mobiles, tablets, and iPhone.
– Minimize the HTTP requests that are required upon loading.
– Optimize your images by making sure they are not larger than they need to be and are in the right file format
6. SEO friendly
With a visually attractive website design and a clear focus on your target audience, the last step to do is to rank up on search engine and expand your customer base. SEO is important because it is a great way to improve the quality of your website and able to save you a lot of marketing dollars down the road. If you have not heard of what SEO is, you could take a quick look on the Wikipedia definition of the term.
- Integrate Social Media into your website’s design. Search engines love social media, as do your prospective customers.
- Place strategic keywords. Keyword research is a complex chore, but what holds more complexity is correct placement of researched keywords.
- Make sure you SEO for your images too. Use a relevant keyword in the alt text section of your images.
- Make sure your URL is User-Friendly. Avoid symbols or hard to read texts and try to limit the categories in the link.
- Have a link building strategy in place. According to a study, most major search engines rank Web pages based on the number and the quality of links that point to the Website (link popularity).
- Build valuable content on your website. Having a blog/news page in your website can be a great tool to enhance your SEO strategy. Content worthy blog is a great source of user engagement.
Ultimately, building a professional and well-designed website is a small investment compared to the benefits and business growth that will come with it.
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If you are looking to improve on your business with digital solutions such as website design, digital marketing or reviewing your online platform, feel free to email us at enquiry@apexmedia.com.sg
We are more than happy to provide a complimentary consultation with regards to your business!