web design best practices

It is vital to make a good first impression with appealing, intuitive and effective design. We made a list of Web design best practices for 2022.

Clear calls-To-Action

Your calls-to-action (CTAs) motivate your customers to convert, whether by purchasing your products, subscribing to your content or booking a call or appointment.

So, how do you make sure your calls-to-action is as powerful as it can be?

Let’s use Google as an example.

What to consider:

1. What’s being offered is clear, enticing and sets the stage for the CTA
2. Potential objections are addressed right away: Users can cancel anytime.
3. Bold, colored CTA in a highly visible location: The CTA itself is instantly obvious. It’s colored and unmistakable. To drive conversions, users can enter their email address to get started immediately.

Spur your users to action with a powerful CTA and you’ll see stronger results.

Here’s how we did it

User Friendly

Your website gives your users a solution to complex problems or access to lots of helpful content. Your navigation and buttons should be clear and obvious so users can explore your content intuitively.

Intuitive navigation:

1. Clear language: Use simple, recognizable terms like “About”, “Services”, and “Contact” in your navigation. Don’t use unique language just for the sake of doing something different as it could confuse your users.
2. Tailor your navigation to your content: You might only need a few navigation links if you have a website with limited content. With heavier content, you might need more detailed navigation. Descriptive mega menus give your users a clear path to find the information they need when there’s a lot of available content.
3. Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs track and display where a user is on a website. They let a user easily return to a previous page by retracing their steps. Breadcrumbs are especially useful for content-heavy websites and ecommerce shops. And you get brownie points with search engines for having them.

Clean design

1. Digestible. It is a good practice to be aware to your user’s cognitive load. You don’t want to overwhelm people with an explosion of colors, images and copy. Instead, make your website easy and enjoyable for them with clean design and meaningful (and only meaningful) content.
2. Visual hierarchy. It’s the arrangement of all the design elements of a website in order of importance. For example, if a headline is large, contrasting in color and centered on a page it immediately comes across as being more important than something smaller, not uniquely colored, and offset.
3. Use white space effectively. White space is the ‘negative’ space between the layout elements, paragraphs and visual components. Designing with white space in mind will make your content more scannable, digestible and easier on the eyes.

Consistency

Brand Identity. Your logo, color scheme and iconography should remain consistent. The same holds true for your brand voice and key messaging. You want to reinforce your value proposition, aesthetics and tone across your website.

A focus on consistency will enable your marketing efforts and help build brand equity. Learn about branding and business vocabulary here.

Prioritize search engine optimization (SEO)

There are three kinds of SEO are: On-page SEO – Anything on your web pages – Blogs, product copy, web copy. Off-page SEO – Anything which happens away from your website that helps with your SEO Strategy- Backlinks. Technical SEO – Anything technical undertaken to improve Search Rankings – site indexing to help bot crawling.

SEO priority list for better performance

• Keyword targeted.
• Crawlable + accessible to search engines.
• Fresh unique and authoritative content.
• Expertise, authority and trust.
• Satisfies user intent.
• Quality backlinks.
• Made for multiple devices.
• Earn more clicks.