If you spend just a little amount of time on the internet, you can find literally hundreds of web design hacks for your website. There are countless web designers out there, all with their own idea of what constitutes a good website.
The reality is, web design is a very subjective topic area, which means, what one person may think is great, another may find to be quite hideous.
A website should be designed in such a way to create brand awareness and credibility. Learning about the various web design hacks can have many positive implications for your website. You want to get the most out of your virtual real estate, which means the best conversion rates.
Despite the fact that, web design is ultimately a subjective area, there are many objective things that you can and should incorporate into your site to make it better.
Table of Contents
All of these are outlined below:
1. Consider Above the Fold
This is a concept you may or may not have heard about, but it is very important. Most web designers and webmasters that know a thing or two about site design, prioritise it. It’s in your best interest to focus on it, while delivering the best possible content imaginable.
Here are some tips for you to consider:
- Make sure you have a CTA that is easy to spot.
- Go with a headline that is clear and easy to read. This means, you should focus on grabbing the user’s attention, by highlighting the many benefits of your brand. The utilisation of keywords is a great way to go about doing this.
- Make your site more appealing with images and media. People tend to remember more of what they visualise over what they read – so bear that in mind.
2. Learn Everything on SEO
Web design and SEO are two different topics, so it’s understandable if you don’t know very much about it. But the reality is, how you construct your sites has a huge impact on how it will perform in the search engines.
As a designer, there are a number of things you should consider, if you want it to perform well in the search engine:
- You want to use header tags in the article <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> tags.
- Any image that you add to your pages should be optimised in order to improve site loading times. Slow sites tend to have high bounce rates, which is, a measurement of how many users visit just one page on your site before leaving.
- Think about your site slug, which is the URL. If you’re targeting a specific keyword for a page, then it should be included in the URL.
This is just a starter, SEO is a very big, very complex subject area. But if you really want to get the most out of it, you will need to do your research. There are so many places where you can start.
3. Prioritise Website Speed
One area of a websites design that many designers tend to neglect is its speed. However, it has proven to be one of the more important areas of a website.
The truth is, the speed of a website has a huge impact on its overall user experience. The site speed affects the site in terms of bounce rate, overall conversions, and more.
If a website takes a long time to load, most people will become fed up over a short period of time and simply leave the site. Bounce rates can also impact how the site is treated by the search engines (though not officially confirmed).
4. Use Real Images
One mistake that many new site owners make when having their first website built. Although tempting, it’s definitely not the best idea to go with stock images. This is because the pictures that you use, on your site, can both positively or negatively affect its authenticity.
If you want a site that is more convincing, then it’s recommended you go with real images. One thing to keep in mind is that users relate more to images that are both relevant and authentic. This in turn positively affects the site in other areas, such as site conversions.
5. Utilise White Space
In the world of web design, the space which is occupied by elements within your page are referred to as positive space, while the unused areas are called white space or negative space – which ever you prefer.
For a lot of web designers, especially the beginner, they will look to put as much information into every available space on their page. This results in a site that looks noisy and cluttered.
When your site has that cluttered look, it can confuse the user, with many visitors deciding to leave the site altogether.
As a website owner, it’s in your best interest to have as much white space on your site as possible. When effectively used, you can have a call to action and links that stand out considerably more and in turn lead to more conversions.
In order to increase your sites white space, you will need to break up your text by using more paragraphs. Use bullet points and lists where you can and use images and videos between texts.
6. Use a Responsive Design
The reality is, people are accessing the web on a wide variety of devices. All of which have their own unique screen sizes. For you, you want your website to offer the same experience to every user irrespective of the device they are using to access it on. Instead of wasting time and resources on implementing hover effects or complex animations into your site design, it’s best that you spend that time working on your sites user experience.
When you go with a responsive design, it means having a site that is user friendly, optimised for every kind of viewing on all devices, whether it be laptop, desktop, tablet or mobile phone.
Having a responsive design today, is simply a matter of acquiring the right theme for your site. So go ahead and research all the various options and choose the one best to your liking.
AUTHOR INFO
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk.