The user experience is crucial today, as company websites serve as the foundation for engagement between the brand and the customer. Anything less than a smooth experience can spoil a potentially long relationship. Effective website design provides security assurances, a streamlined experience, optimized SEO, scalability and much more.
While there are best practices that all web developers need to adhere to, a website can be as unique as a fingerprint, providing users with an experience tailored to that specific brand. Frequently reviewing your website for weaknesses and potential areas of improvement is a smart move.
Cyber Threats
Your website design must include strong security features for protecting customer information. Blocking hackers from gaining access includes utilizing safeguards that protect your site against intrusion. While you may initially save resources by using a DIY template for website design, these sites can quickly become buggy, allowing easy infiltration by outsiders.
Room to Grow
When you’re starting fresh, your site might not need more than a handful of pages, but recognizing the potential for growth includes planning for a scalable website. While the home page will likely be the most important and most visited, your product page might eventually need subcategories. In addition, many growing companies invest in extensive content creation as an important part of SEO and to share the company’s expertise, which requires a scalable site.
Attracting Users
Research is vital in optimizing for search engine optimization (SEO), as you’ll need to know the most relevant keywords that will help direct traffic to your site. Website design professionals place a high priority on this task because including best practices for SEO will help your site rank higher on search engine listings and send more traffic to your site.
Going With the Flow
How easy is your site to navigate, explore and learn from? When you streamline the user experience, you’re taking an objective view of your site and ensuring it isn’t clunky or presenting unnecessary hurdles for users. It’s a good idea to evaluate your site from the perspective of a visitor, talking with a web developer about the kinds of design problems that can cause a new user to click away from your site.
Website Accessibility
Intellectual, physical, sensory and cognitive disabilities impact almost 86 million people in the U.S., an important element you should consider in your website design. If you think it doesn’t impact your business, consider this number: $828 million. That’s the amount of money e-commerce retailers lost over a single holiday season in 2021 because their websites weren’t accessible to a portion of the population.
Need assistance with your website design? Work with us at SJC Marketing and we’ll get your site optimized, streamlined and ready with the information your customers and visitors are seeking. Contact us and let’s talk about what your site needs.