Your website is the face of your business. It’s where you make your first impression and build trust with your audience. It establishes your credibility, connects you with your target audience, and ultimately helps you generate leads and sales.
If you want to build an online presence and generate leads, you need a professional-looking website designs that reflects your brand. To achieve that, you need to know the elements of modern web design and how to use them.
While many elements play into the success of a website, here are five of the most important ones you should utilize.
5 Key Elements of a Modern Website Design
1. Mobile-Friendly User Interface
Did you know that more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices?
That means your website needs to be responsive and mobile-friendly, or you’re going to miss out on a lot of business. In addition, today’s customers want a seamless experience that works across multiple devices and platforms, so they can access your site whether they’re at home, sitting at their desk, or on the bus using their smartphone.
Any web design agency would advise mobile-friendliness as one of the top elements you need to incorporate into your website design.
How can you ensure that your website is mobile-friendly?
- Give your users a consistent experience across multiple devices by using responsive web design, which automatically adjusts a website’s layout based on the device it’s being viewed (i.e., smartphone, tablet, or desktop).
- Make sure to choose fonts that are clear and easy to read on small screens.
- Split your texts into short paragraphs and bullets to increase readability on smartphones.
- Only include images, videos, and other multimedia elements that don’t occupy a vast space.
2. Clear Navigation
Nobody likes getting lost on the internet, but it often happens because of poor navigation structures and unclear labels. A transparent navigation system with proper labeling can help your visitors stay on track and find what they came to your site to look for.
How can you establish straightforward navigation?
- Include a straightforward navigation menu at the top of every web page to ensure that your website users can easily switch access and search your website.
- Add an onsite search bar along with the main menu for users to browse and find the products/services they need without any delay.
- Create a hierarchical structure within the website with main menus and submenus with clear navigation labels for people to easily click through.
Not sure how to create a sitemap with a hierarchical structure? Reach out to our team at our web design company for a consultation.
3. Easy Skimmability
Have you ever been burdened with so much information that you forget what the point of everything is?
It’s frustrating and can even cause people to leave the website altogether. Many website visitors want to find information as fast as possible and then move on with their day.
With more content available than ever before, you need to make sure that your website is skimmable and easy to digest quickly if you want to keep people’s attention. Nobody wants to read through reams of text that could easily be turned into charts or graphs or explained in bullet points instead of paragraphs.
How can you make it easy for users to skim your website?
- Make sure you use headings and subheadings so people can skim through the content, find the information they need, and reach their end goal quickly.
- Include bullet points and short paragraphs to summarize the complex points.
- Use the website design features to highlight the main features or benefits to grab the user’s attention.
- Use a lot of white space between the paragraphs and rows in a website to make it easy for the users to skim through.
4. Strategically Placed Call-to-Actions (CTAs)
A CTA is a button or link that visitors click on to perform an action such as purchasing a product, downloading content, reaching out to a business, or any other end goal. Therefore, CTAs need to be carefully positioned throughout your site so users can easily find them and take action.
Having clear calls to action on your website is essential for today’s successful web design. So if you want to achieve optimal results, it’s necessary to make sure that your CTA buttons are strategically placed throughout your website.
How should your CTAs be placed?
- Add CTAs above the fold in every website at the top of the web page.
- Include CTAs on your homepage, landing pages, product pages, and every other significant page on your website.
- Ensure you have one primary CTA per page and at least one secondary CTA on every landing page.
- Have one clear motive for all the CTAs on a webpage.
- Place CTAs in areas where people notice them, such as above the menu bar, a large headline section, or below a significant revelation point.
5. Fast-Loading Webpages
If web pages take too long to load, people will leave your site before they see what you have to offer. In fact, one study showed that nearly half of all consumers expect pages to load in two seconds or less.
What does this mean for you?
It means you have to make sure your web pages load quickly and efficiently. This includes images and videos on each page and the content itself. If anything takes too long to load, it may cause visitors to exit your site altogether.
How can you increase your website loading speed?
- Use a lightweight website design that doesn’t weigh heavily on the backend.
- You can compress images so they don’t slow down your site.
- Use a tool such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how long it takes each page on your site to load at regular intervals.
Working on your entire website design to improve the site speed can be challenging. You can get the help of design experts at our web design agency to improve usability and loading speed.
Wrapping Up
Your company’s website is the first point of contact for most customers. For this reason, it should be an excellent reflection of your brand and offer a seamless user experience.
With these web design elements to include on your website, you can improve user-friendliness, SEO-worthiness, and functionalities — which work together to improve your conversions.
