6 Modern Web Design Tips You Can't Ignore Anymore

Great website design starts with the fundamentals. Here's how you can turn your website from boring and unhelpful to dynamic and valuable.

Whichever type of business you run, having a clean, user-friendly website is critical. Your website not only serves as the online home for your business and offers, but also anchors your entire online marketing approach, giving a central hub to point toward and connect customers with your brand and business. Delivering a poor website experience can hinder those efforts and sever those connections before they even start.

Here are six web design tips for turning your site into a customer conversion machine in 2022 and beyond.

1. Build your site for first impressions

When it comes to helpful web design tips, first impressions still make the top of the list. That's because what users interact with immediately after loading your site creates the groundwork for their entire experience. And if your website isn't delivering the expectations in those crucial opening seconds, you're not only losing first time visitors, but opportunities to create a powerful and positive memory of your brand that generates interest and sales down the road.

The truth is there are many factors that impact those critical first impressions, and taking the time to prioritize those factors is key to creating an appealing professional website. Visual elements like structure, colors and spacing often play a meaningful role in your website's overall appeal. At the same time, commonly forgotten about features like text layout and even the fonts you use have a very real effect on-site experience and overall engagement.

Having an eye for these details and their proper place in the visual hierarchy not only results in a more visually stunning website, but it can also help turn more chance visits into extended stays, providing users the eye-catching web pages and experience they need to stick around and buy from your business.

To build a successful website that pops at first glance, it's important to focus on:

• Simplicity. Users tend to prefer simple, straightforward web designs over the complex. The easier it is to absorb and engage with the visual elements on your web pages, the better.

• Familiarity. From stock photos and headers to logos and CTAs, all visual elements on your site should meet visitor expectations and provide visual cues as to what you do and offer. Including unfamiliar images and elements often only leads to confusion, and, ultimately, a negative brand impression.

• Accuracy. Populating your site with brand-accurate visual elements is web design 101. All features should be consistent and accurately reflect your brand throughout your site.

2. Optimize each page for mobile users

You can't create a web design tips list these days without putting mobile optimization near the top. Why? Because mobile really freaking matters. So much so, in fact, that nearly 80% of people say they're more likely to return to your site or share it with others if it's mobile-friendly. If your web designer isn't focused on building a good and responsive website for mobile, your business is missing an easy opportunity to generate repeat visits and spread the word about your brand.

More consumers are using mobile devices to search and research businesses online. If your web pages aren't loading correctly, or your web design isn't making that mobile experience seamless, potential customers are likely jumping ship fast, abandoning your site and business for others in your space. Over time, those mobile issues begin to add up, creating a growing problem for your brand, reputation, and bottom line while making it exponentially harder to attract new business.

That said, prioritizing mobile navigability and layout in your web design approach is extremely important. From the start, it's essential to view each visual element, logo, block of text, social media icons, and call to action buttons through the lens of mobile, ensuring each feature and every aspect of your design process is mobile-friendly and designed to deliver a next-level experience.

This can mean anything from including only essential visual cues (logos, menu, CTAs, buttons) throughout your mobile site to focusing on eye-catching fonts, making your text and service pages more scannable, and resizing page elements for easier user interaction.

3. Maximize your load time

A slow website can quickly become your worst enemy, often making it impossible to keep prospects on board and nudge them closer to the point of purchase. Like it or not, today's savvy, seasoned site visitors expect websites to load fast, and if your homepage or blog posts aren't popping up quickly, they're likely going elsewhere to find what they need.

In other words, a website's loading time is an important, if not essential, part of any practical and responsive design effort. It has an indelible impact on the visitor experience and, ultimately, your ability to convert. Understanding how fast your pages load and how to optimize those loading times isn't just one of those web design tips you can gloss over or ignore. It's a critical part of the creative job, and should always be a top priority when building a site design that shines.

Fortunately, you have numerous methods at their disposal for getting your website up to speed. Some of the easiest ways you can speed up load times and outpace your competitor's site include:

• Resizing images. Photos and graphics tend to take up a lot of space, something that dramatically impacts page loading times. Taking steps to compress and optimize images can help reduce those file sizes while shaving precious milliseconds off the page load experience.

• Managing site plugins. Plugins, can often go a long way toward improving overall site speed. Yet, loading your site up with too many can really drag down performance. Clearing out the bulk and keeping only those you need can help ramp up site speed in a hurry.

• Monitoring speed regularly. Careful, ongoing monitoring throughout and beyond the design process is critical. Doing so allows you to identify issues quickly and take steps to resolve problems before they snowball into a crisis.

4. Focus on a tailored user experience

Creating a website that attracts the largest possible audience is, well, important. But it's the ability to deliver personalized shopping experiences that really sets good web design apart. Incorporating shopper personalization techniques into and across your own site design is how you go beyond the standard digital marketing approach to make a genuine connection, providing users the tailored, relevant content and experience that bolsters sentiment and compels action.

Working customer personalization into your web design strategy might seem daunting at first, particularly with so many other design tips out there and so many elements to worry about across the visual hierarchy.

Luckily, there are a few relatively simple ways to consider and fit personalization into your web design approach, from baking tailored, behavior-based product recommendations into your design infrastructure to working in dynamic, hyper-relevant CTAs into each new site visit. Providing tailored photos and interactive features that appeal to specific targets can also be an excellent way to optimize your design for personalization.

With companies like Amazon and other popular e-commerce websites now outfitted for hyper-personalization, many shoppers now expect and demand a tailored experience during each new visit. That makes personalization an integral part of any web design effort.

5. Don't forget the SEO

Designing a beautiful, user-friendly website that delivers an exceptional visitor experience is great. Unless, of course, your customers aren't able to find it.

Online visibility is key not only to making your website easy to find but also to getting that site in front of customers when they need it most. By making SEO a central part of your web design strategy, you can help provide the push it needs to shine in search engines and generate the user engagement rates that keep it at the top.

Understandably, there's often a disconnect between the work of web design and the world of SEO, with many a web designer consigning SEO to the realm of digital marketing and content generation, and vice versa. Yet, there are many things designers can do to provide a powerful visibility lift right from the start.

Utilizing basic SEO principles in, say, headline creation, image captioning, subhead creation and even URL design can often add up, strengthening the site's ranking signals and search potential immediately after launch. Knowing how to break up text and where to work interactive elements within content and page structure can also be an easy but effective way to optimize search readiness right from the start.

Regardless if you're working with experienced, skilled designers or first-time site builders, overlooking SEO in your web design process is done at your own risk.

6. When in doubt leave it to a professional

If designing your website doesn't align with your skillset or time commitment then it is best to leave the task to a professional web designer. Fortunately as time has gone on paying someone to build you a high quality, well functioning and visually appealing website is not going to cost you an arm and a leg like it used to. In fact, you can get a cost effective website built by a professional for a fraction of what you would have spent 5 years ago.

Essentially sometimes doing it yourself isn't the best option and almost always will cost you more in the long run because you will certainly be losing countless customers to your competition if your website isn't up to par and theirs is.

Schedule a complimentary consultation with one of our pros today to ensure that you don't miss out when and where it counts.