Websites have evolved considerably in the last 20 years or so. One of the biggest factors is the use of smart phones to search the web and view websites. So while some “caveats of good web design” as it was in the old days remain, others have changed.
Let’s explore how to enhance the performance of your website by making relatively simple tweaks and modifications.
Make it mobile-friendly.
First and foremost, your website should be mobile friendly. That means it should be configured for a zoomed-in view when visitors arrive from a smart phone browser. But let’s also remember that other screen sizes can affect how your website shows up in a browser. You want your website to look “normal” and be functional whether a visitor happens to be viewing from a mobile phone, a tablet, or a desktop computer.
How do you turn your website dynamic, to accommodate these slight adjustments in the view? The answer is that you select a good WordPress theme that has this feature built in.
My favorite theme is Bam. While creating or editing your site using the Bam theme, you can switch back and forth between the Desktop, Mobile and Tablet views. Then, adjust small details from one view to the next. For example, did you know that you can change the font size to be smaller on the mobile view, and larger for the Desktop view? Pretty rad.
Try the vertical scroll layout.
The other impact smart phones have had on websites is the scroll phenomenon. This has created a growing need/desire for a vertical website, which basically means all pages can be viewed in a vertical scroll format, with options to use jump links that take you to whatever page you want to be reading.
If you Google or search WordPress for themes, you’ll find some that provide a vertical layout to help you achieve this scrolling effect.
There are ways to make your site more “vertical” without using the vertical style template. To do this in WordPress, you’d change your site from having a sidebar, to simply being one rectangle with a header and footer.
You wouldn’t have the jump links unless you hand coded them. But it would still be better when viewed from a smart phone, because the side bar would not end up stacking over the footer, which can create redundancy if you’re featured some of the same things in the sidebar as the footer, such as a sign-up form or search bar.
Leave lots of whitespace, but not too much.
In the old days, it was common to give the eye a break by adding white space around your text boxes when creating a website. But these days, many website design templates take this too far, particularly the drag-and-drop templates that you’ll find with SquareSpace and similar platforms. These templates generally give you a set space to type content into, but they don’t offer the design control of being able to widen or slim the margins.
WordPress websites offer greater control of space, especially if you activate the Classic editor (which is still extremely popular) as a plug-in. You can increase or decrease margins, and set the padding or outside border to whatever number you like.
If you’re not sure how much space to leave, take a look around at what other websites use in their designs. Choose one to emulate that has visual appeal, and then try to figure out what amount of space they included for their margins, borders and padding.
Strive for your website to be less busy.
To make your website less busy and more of a calm viewing and reading experience, the design and layout should be simple. One example of this: let’s say you use bright, bold colors to make your company’s promotional graphics. Sometimes having a site with bold colors can detract from your graphic presentation. Tone down your background colors or images, and use simple, sans-serif body text fonts, to keep the reader focused.
Speed up your site’s load time.
The time it takes for your website to serve up content after people click on it, is very important. If there’s a delay, if images don’t load, and it seems broken, you’ll lose visitors. Just like that, they’ll become impatient, and click away to go do something else.
To speed up load time, shrink your images (should be .JPG files of 50KB or smaller, or about 600 pixels across when uploaded). Even thought it’s possible to upload bigger file sizes especially using WiFi, it’s just smarter to first shrink the size and compress the images so it will load fast no matter what internet speed the end user has.
Most important info above the scroll.
This is a classic caveat of good web design that people often forget about. Even if your site is more scroll-friendly, and you know people are likely to be viewing from their phones… it’s STILL important to place the most important part of the message up top.
Once people start to scroll, attention spans drift, and your visitors might get lazy and click off the page to check out something else that has distracted them.
Add a pop-up or pop-over form.
You really, really need lead capture if you’re hoping to attract visitors from search engines. The pop-up or pop-over form needs to come from whatever email marketing service you signed up for, such as AWeber.
Did you know you can set the form with a delay, so that it doesn’t show until after a certain number of seconds? You can also configure your form to only show once per day, which is far less annoying than a form that pops up with each page visit or refresh of the current page.
Add calls to action.
If you’d like visitors to visit the contact page and fill out a form or email you from there, then clearly state that. Believe it or not, people don’t always reach out.
A sign-up form and short command such as “Sign up for more tasty tidbits like these, right here” will grab them on the way out, so you can store their contact info for later.
Use this checklist as a set of guidelines to improve your website’s visual presentation. If yours is a 5-page site and you’re comfortable working in WordPress, it should only take a few days at most, to implement these changes.
You can also opt to have Jersey Girl Websites conduct a website overhaul.
Give us an hour and we’ll write you up a list of tasks to do that may help you rank better, collect more leads and covert more sales.
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