Designing effective websites requires web developers to keep up with the latest trends. Keeping up with these trends shows that the developer understands consumer behaviour and can produce websites that are easy to use and effective for their intended purpose. Following the best practices outlined below will help any web developer to build modern websites that appeal to audiences in 2022.
1. Keep your branding consistent
A strong brand identity is an incredibly valuable asset for any business. A brand without a coherent identity is going to struggle to make waves and achieve any significant market penetration. A solid and consistent brand identity, on the other hand, makes all of a business’s marketing efforts more effective.
As long as you maintain consistency across your crucial customer touchpoints, establishing and maintaining a consistent brand identity should be relatively easy. Problems arise when your approaches to these touchpoints become disjointed. A website is one of the most critical customer touchpoints for any business that has one, meaning it’s essential that you remain on message throughout every page.
Businesses need to use the same logo, font, colour scheme, and messaging across touchpoints to keep branding consistent. When designing any website for a client, it’s essential that you speak to them beforehand to get a feel for their brand and their preferred messaging tone and style. If someone else is handling the website’s copy, focus on ensuring that your website’s aesthetic is in keeping with the rest of the client’s marketing.
2. Make your calls to action as clear as possible
Many people underestimate just how effective calls to action are at motivating readers to behave in particular ways. Whether it’s directing them to make a purchase, read an article, or take any similar actions, calls to action are an integral part of messaging for any marketing campaign. But while any call to action is better than none at all, you shouldn’t be relying purely on simple and generic calls. You also need to deploy your CTAs in the right way if they are to have the desired impact.
To write effective calls to action, you need to look beyond the action itself and think about how you present the call. The most important thing for ensuring a call to action is effective is making sure that the reader understands exactly what they’re being asked to do and how taking that action will benefit them. If there are any obvious obstacles or impediments that might keep a user from taking the desired action, you should aim to address these beforehand. For example, if the CTA is telling the reader to subscribe to a service, make sure they know they can cancel their subscription easily if they ever want to.
3. Prioritise simple navigation
Making sure your websites are easily navigable is arguably the single most important aspect of their design. If a website is difficult to navigate, users will spend less time on it, and many will simply give up and move on to a competitor. Therefore, no matter how big the website you’re designing is and how many pages comprise it, you need to ensure it’s as easy as possible for new and frequent visitors alike to find what they need.
There are several components to an intuitive navigation system. For example, you should use clear language and suitable labels for every section and sub-section of your sites. Ideally, there should be a menu that your users can use to navigate to any part of your website and see what page they’re currently on.
4. Keep your overall design clean
You don’t necessarily need to use a minimalist design, but you should keep your websites as clean and simple as possible. Don’t be shy about removing any extraneous elements that don’t serve a specific purpose. By pruning these excessive elements and focusing on the content that matters the most, you can easily streamline any website you’ve designed.
The same logic applies to elements you’re adding to your site. Before inserting any new images or updating the website’s copy, ask yourself what the purpose of these new elements is. If you can’t justify these new elements to yourself, that’s usually a solid indication that they aren’t really needed, and your website might function better without them.
These best practices are just some of those that web designers need to design effective, attractive and intuitive websites for their clients. But for businesses hiring a web development agency to produce their website for them, it can be difficult to ascertain whether the developers they hire will adhere to these and other best practices. Mazespace is a creative agency with offices in London and San Francisco and a proven track record of producing high-quality websites for a range of clients.
Contact us today to find out more about our digital marketing and web development services.