Creating an online business requires a good website with a strong and focused design that can drive visitors towards it. However, choosing an actual design that makes commercial sense isn’t all that simple. Advertising your products or your services online isn’t the same as on print, so the same design sensibilities don’t necessarily apply. This is why it is essential to understand good website design principles that can adapt to today’s online marketing audience.
Here are just a few tips on how to create a site design that can suit your business.
Build a Design Based on Your Business Needs and Purpose
The first thing you might want to ask yourself is: “What is the main purpose of my site?” As a business site, this is the basic question that you need to answer. If you site is here to showcase the latest products in your inventory, then creating a commercial site using an e-commerce design could best suit your needs. Alternately, if you want to build your brand, you can try improving your brand equity through content that is shareable and easily accessible via social media channels. If you’re able to pinpoint the purpose of your site and make a decision from there, you will be able to make a sensible design choice that will move your business forward.
Use Specific Content that Drives Your Audience
In the end, content is still the one driving factor that can make or break your site. With so many other sites competing to be on the top spot of the search engine results, creating targeted and focused content for your audience is a surefire strategy in driving traffic to your site. Of course, this isn’t as easy as it sounds – especially if you are trying to aim for content that is running on very high competition keywords. Still, by designing specific content that addresses your site users’ needs, you can gain a following that will convince them to come back for more. You can also try creating specific landing pages or designated sections for these types of focused content so that they can become your “money pages” that can funnel your conversions.
Silo Your Content
This is a popular site design that makes organizing your content much simpler. You can start by creating categories for similar content and group them together into subdirectories. This way, as your site content grows, you can easily keep track of everything and avoid any unnecessary clutter. As a business site using this type of design, you can easily switch out landing pages depending on the campaign that you are currently running. By structuring your site into logical directories, you are effectively planning for a long term design that can adapt to your business needs.
Consider a Pageless Design
An alternative design to the previous point would be a pageless design. This is starting to become a growing trend that many site designers and users have responded positively over the past few years. Apart from it being able to deliver content in a seamless manner, it strikes an excellent balance between visuals and text that users can easily go through. This type of site design has also been seen to be more attractive in the sense that bounce rates are lower and that conversion rates are better. In addition, it is very responsive to all types of mobile devices and can be quite popular in terms of social media shares.
Don’t Forget to Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
Gearing your site in becoming SEO friendly should always be something to keep in mind. Visibility on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) is still a great way to attract people towards your site and to acquire potential customers or clients. Fixing basic onpage SEO elements like Title tags, Meta tags and descriptions, Header tags, and others is something you should incorporate in every page of your site. This can lead to a more streamlined design and entice both users and search engines to visit your site.
