Which Item Is Most Important for a Successful Website Design?

According to some research, you only have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression.

Because of that, it’s very important that you have a good website design. But there are several website components you’ll need to have for that to happen.

Keep reading to discover all you need to know about what type of elements you need to focus on to have a successful website.

Content Management System

If you want to have a good website design, then you also need a good content management system that can work in the backend. This will help you maintain and organize your website.

It’ll manage your metadata and website pages, and it’ll also make it easier for your visitors to get around your website and find the information that they need.

If you’re just building your website for the first time, you should get a website builder. There are many different sites that can help, including Squarespace, Wix, Zoho Sites, and more. Some of them have templates and can help you build your own, but you may want to hire a website designer first.

User-Friendly Design

When users come onto your website, you’ll need to greet them with a user-friendly design. A successful website design will be laid out in an organized and clean manner.

Your website should be easy to navigate so that users can find what they’re looking for easily and quickly. You’ll also want to test your website out on different devices, like computers, tablets, and mobile devices, to ensure that the format still translates and is usable.

Good Navigation

When someone finds your website, they’ll need to know how to navigate it to find everything that they’re looking for. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll leave your site frustrated, and Google will make a note of that and hurt your ranking.

All of your menu items should be accessible from any page. A site map can be a good idea and should be used if they’re available. Most websites could benefit from having this site map, but you need to make sure that when you have an interactive menu, it should also be functional.

SEO

There’s no point in having great website elements if you don’t incorporate SEO into your website. These are foundational elements, like the structure of your site and the content on your pages.

If you don’t have SEO experience, choose a website designer who has expertise in this so that they can set you up for long-lasting results. Keep in mind that SEO isn’t a one-time thing. It’s a continuous process, and improving your visibility starts with having a good website foundation.

SEO can be very technical, and it requires more than just optimizing for keywords.

Purpose

Your website will also need to have a purpose that will help guide customers through your website and help them make sense of it. This will tell them how to interact with your website.

For example, if you’re an entertainment website, are you selling products, or are you trying to provide entertainment? There are a few different core purposes that your website can have, but you should make sure that you have one main one.

For example, you might want to describe your business’s expertise, build up your reputation, generate leads, or try and get sales.

Value Proposition

The purpose of your website is an important element, but it also helps inform your value proposition. This is your mission statement and will dictate what visitors should do when they get to your website. You should convey what your website is about, why it’s important, and what services or products you’re offering.

You should also address your target audience and tell people what information your website can offer. You should also show what benefits the website will offer to the audience in order to help them figure out if the website is for them.

Web Hosting

You’ll need someone to host your business as well, and there are many services that you can choose from. Keep in mind that once you choose a web hoster, it’ll be very difficult to change it later on, so you should ensure that you choose the right one.

For example, you can use web hosting services, but do your research to find one. Keep in mind that the web hosting speed will also end up factoring into your SEO speed time, which Google classifies as an important ranker.

Visual Design

People are visually oriented, and having great graphics will draw people in and make it more appealing. Remember that your website won’t have much time to impress your audience, so you’ll need to ensure these graphics are of the highest quality.

While you should include great graphics, you don’t want to include too many. If you have scrolling text, animations, and other distractions, it can seem like too much. Having all of these can also slow down your website speed time, which can hurt your SEO ranking too.

Good Programming

Programming is important to have a properly functioning website that users can actually use. A good website designer will think about the different processes that a website will need to have.

The programming can impact the site load times, animations, transitions, navigations, paths, and more.

You’ll need to have a designer who can help with technical aspects and manage all of the elements on your website.

Simplicity

Another important website element is making your website as simple as possible. This will greatly improve the user experience on your website, and there are many design choices you can make that promote this.

One of them is by using the right font. This will be one of the main things that people notice, and it’s important when you’re trying to communicate your brand voice. You should choose a font that is easy to read and don’t use more than three different fonts on your website.

When you use too many fonts, it can make your website seem like it’s not coherent, and it can ruin your marketing efforts.

The brand colors that you have on your website are important as well. The colors can communicate messages to your audience about your business and possibly even evoke emotional responses.

You should find a color palette that accurately reflects your brand but also make it influences your customers’ decisions. You shouldn’t choose more than five colors.

Try using complementary colors very well. When you have good color combinations, it will increase your customers’ engagement and make them feel good.

You should also include images and graphics that support your brand. This includes illustrations, photographs, videos, and other graphics. You should also try and capture the brand’s personality and spirit.

Most of these graphics will catch peoples’ eyes first, so they’re key to making a good first impression.

Contact Forms

When you have contact or signup forms on your website, they need to be working properly so that people will know that their form went through. Every form should have a thank you page afterward so that people will know that form was sent.

You can even do something extra and add a call-to-action button on the thank you page. This can help you add a few engaged users to your website’s following.

Accessibility

Most people who visit your website won’t care about checking out every single page that you have. Instead, most of them will come here for information on how to contact you or learn more about your products or services.

This is why your site needs to be easily accessible so that people can easily find what they’re looking for. If they can’t find it, they’ll just leave your site frustrated.

The experience will be annoying, and they likely won’t return to do business with you. Instead, they’ll go to a website that is easier to navigate.

Load Time

One way to ensure people never come back to your site is a slow loading time.

In fact, 47% of users expect a page to load in either two seconds or less. If it takes longer than three seconds to load, 40% of your visitors will just leave and find a different web page.

One way you can boost your site speed is by choosing a good host. You can also avoid uploading large images and try to optimize the image sizes.

Social Media

Social media is very important for businesses now, and using social media integration can really help to promote your website. You can include links to your social media accounts to help increase your search engine ranking. You can also link to your website on your socials.

Google will then start to associate these social media pages with your company, and it’ll recognize the links and know how to rank them.

It can be overwhelming to be on every platform, but you need to choose the ones where your target audience spends most of their time. For example, if you are selling to businesses, then you might have more success on LinkedIn than on TikTok.

Some website builders will even let you integrate your website posts into your social media account so that you don’t have to duplicate any of your efforts.

Call to Actions

What is the goal of your website? Do you want people to learn more about your website, or do you want them to purchase products?

You can direct your audience to the right thing by using calls to action (CTAs). The action should be clear to the visitors.

You can help guide them through the steps and web pages so that they can purchase your products or services or submit a lead. You can design the CTAs so that the visitors will know where to go and what to do if they want to learn more information.

If you have a good website designer, then they’ll be able to add contact information to your website footer and even provide valuable links to your other web pages. This will make it very easy for people who visit your site.

You may also want to consider making your CTAs a different color so that they catch people’s attention and evoke an emotional reaction, like buying a new product.

About Us Page

While having your services and products easily available is important, people want to know who you are and what your business is about. This might seem like a boring page to have, but it’s actually very essential.

However, you can get really creative on this about page and use it to your advantage. This can be a place where you can highlight your brand personality to work on your marketing strategies.

You can paint a creative portrait of your team and what your company is about. If you have a certain mission or other inspiring stories you want to share, this would be a great place to do so.

However, you’ll still want to present it in an attractive way on your site.