Every so often a company realizes they need to completely redesign their website. The push for a company to do this is to create a more attractive look to their website in hopes it will lead to additional revenue.

While the look of a website is often how we initially judge a website, you have to remember that a website is not art. There are several different skills put to use that range from copy writing and typography, layout, coding, and photography all fused together to create a user experience that not only creates an impression of you, your business and your credibility, but a successful website design is one that is intuitive to navigate and makes it easy for visitors to find and access the content they are looking for.

Your website is the public face of your business. There are a number of factors that you need to be aware of when designing a successful website such as usability and SEO (search engine optimization), navigational considerations that need to be factored into the design. Understanding your market, clientele, potential users, and competitive environment is a large project management task that should kick off your design and building process to ensure your site matches what potential customers and users are looking for.

Website Design for Business

With the recent roll out of Google mobile-friendly mandate (Mobilegeddon), business websites need to be mobile friendly with clean, simple, engaging, usable design and layout. Finding the right balance when it comes to the various design elements of a website so that the emphasis is on the user experience while at the same time conveying your brand message and search visibility is the biggest challenge for successful website design.

Website Usability

Inbound traffic is key to a marketer’s goal and SEO plays a large part of that activity. It is important to also balance your SEO strategy with your web design layout with actually usability. What happens once users hit your site depends on if they stay or hit be back button.

SEO: Making Sure You Can Be Found

This is where marketing and your website development team really need to come together. While not the most important process in the past, it is now moving more to the forefront as drawing potential customers to your website is an important task if you want to increase your visibility.

Website Content – What are Visitors Really Looking For?

Content is a core element to everything that we do from both a design and marketing perspective. All good design should be focused around quality content that is informative for the user. The key to great content is to provide advice that is relevant and usable by your customers. If your website focus is entertainment, then create that experience. You can use a lot of color and imagery to create that experience. On the other hand, if your website that is more focused on information consumption such as aa blog or is creating in an online magazine format, then the focus clearly needs to be on fast load times, readability (especially on small devices such as smartphones) and clean, concise usability. Consider using a minimalist user interface which does not distract users from the content they have come to your website to consume.content.

Take the time to make your site appealing to your visitors as well as projecting a credible brand and you are in a winning position all around.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paul Albee is the digital marketing director of ATS Design Group in Syracuse, New York. Paul and his team specialize in all aspects of online digital marketing including website design, SEO search engine optimization, social media marketing as well as print and advertising design. Headquartered in the heart of upstate New York, ATS Design Group serves clients across upstate New York and nationwide.

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