In a world gone digital, a visually appealing website is more important than ever. For some business owners, an aesthetically pleasing website can be even more relevant than a welcoming storefront. How can this be? Well, everything starts with a search. More often than not, those searches start online. As a result, a potential customer’s first impression is normally your website. In order to capture that customer’s attention, your website’s design must be beautiful and the experience has to be smooth. In this blog, I’m going to review 3 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Design.

One of the most important aspects of a smooth website design is navigability. Whether your website is a vast hub of information, products, or services, all of that content needs to be easily found. The first thing you need to consider is your menu. Does your menu link out to all relevant pages? If so, great. If not, you need to fix it. Is it structured in a way that everyone can understand? Just because it makes sense to you, doesn’t mean it makes sense to fresh eyes. Ask your friends to take a look. The menu is like the table of contents for a website. It needs to be visible, easily understood, and representative of the core information your website exhibits. 

Aside from the menu, you need internal links throughout the website. Internal links are hyperlinks on one page that link to another relevant page on your website. While necessary for SEO, they’re also a great way for users to navigate to other pages on the site. For example, you might link out to a relevant blog addressing the first question on your FAQ page. 

Lastly, you’ll want to add a form of navigation in the footer. This looks clean, so it improves your website’s design, but it’s also useful. People are lazy. Once they reach the bottom of your website, they might not want to scroll all the way to the top to find their next destination. To account for the laziness, you should add a menu or hyperlinks in the footer, as seen on our website.

To improve your website’s design you’ll need a fine balance of content and copy. While the ideal ratio of content to copy varies from industry to industry, there is always an ideal ratio. To get an idea of what that ratio looks like, take a look at some of your top competitor’s websites. In the video below, I conduct a live website review for one of our clients, Team85. They’re a health and wellness center located in New Jersey and their website is incredibly content heavy. If you search for any successful gym near you, you’ll see that the images and videos on the Team85 website are overbearing in comparison. 

To improve the balance, I suggested adding more sections for relevant information like pricing, hours, program details, etc. However, I understand that website visitors will also want to see images of their facility. To address this, I suggest minimizing the space the images use by implementing carousels or galleries towards the bottom of each page. A more reasonable option would be dedicating specific pages to videos, images, and their virtual tour (shot by our amazing partners at Momentum 360). This would allow visitors to find what they’re looking for based on the navigation label. If they’re looking for the price of Aerobic Classes, they can find it without scrolling through too many images. If they’re looking for images of the fitness classrooms, they can find those under the facilities pages which host all of the images and relevant videos. A balance between content and copy is a key thing to consider when improving your website’s design.

While Page Speed is a burden to fix for anyone not trained heavily in SEO, it’s a necessity. Having to wait for a webpage to load is one of the biggest deterrents for new traffic. Luckily for you, I have some low-hanging fruit that you can grab, so to speak, when it comes to improving page speed. In the video above, I mentioned image compression. Oftentimes, a slow load speed can be attributed to large or uncompressed images. To combat this, you can use tinypng.com to upload your images, compress them, and reupload them to the website. That’s probably the easiest task on the long list of errors most sites suffer from. If you’d like to get an idea of why your site is loading slow, you can either contact us or run a report at pagespeed.web.dev. To tackle Page Speed, be sure to check out these 3 Tools to Improve Page Speed.

In conclusion, improving your website’s design requires a keen eye for user-friendliness. While I outlined 3 simple fixes in this blog, there are still a ton of factors to take into consideration when improving your website’s design. Others include mobile-friendliness, simple call-to-action buttons, redirects, and much, much more. To see examples of incredible design, check out our web design portfolio here. If you decide to take on the task of improving your site and run into trouble, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us for some help!