It is impossible to overstate the value or importance of a company’s website today. Websites that serve purposes as diverse as education, marketing, sales, and more are your most accessible way to communicate to audiences while building a strong brand. However, web design has evolved immensely, not just over the past several decades but even in the past few years.
As a result, good website development for Calgary businesses today means harmonizing many elements while ensuring all parts of the site serve their specific purpose — whether that’s informing users or appealing to search engines. What are some of the core principles behind good web design today?
1. Make Every Page With a Clear Purpose
Users rarely arrive on a web page with the intent to spend more than a few seconds searching for what they expected to find. Therefore, it is critical for every page on your site to reflect the purpose for which it was built. Don’t add pages with no apparent purpose or value-add to the overall experience.
2. Build Content That Scans With Ease
Just as you need to keep a page’s purpose clear, you must also ensure that the content is easy to scan. Users usually don’t spend time reading an entire page worth of content. Instead, they scan in an “F” shaped pattern from left to right, looking for keywords and visual anchors that will tell them to stop and pay closer attention.
3. Keep It Simple
Complex and cluttered web design leads to users feeling overwhelmed and can drive up your bounce rates. The more material there is on a page, the harder it is to discern its purpose and find what you are looking for. Don’t try to stuff too much into your standard site elements, and don’t overload every page with content.
4. Simplify and Guide Navigation
Users should have the ability to quickly and easily navigate your website. A good top-level navigation bar is essential, but so too are more granular navigation elements such as breadcrumbs and category pages. Think logically about how users move around your website and design with those patterns in mind.
5. Build With SEO in Mind
Good search engine optimization starts from the first line of code. Ensure that your pages conform to the web standard and are easy for search crawlers to reach. Use current best practices related to SEO techniques to design pages that will be easy for you to fill with content that search users will want to see.
Design a Better Page for Your Business Today
At Digital Lion, we bring years of experience and an in-depth understanding of web design to bear for our clients. As your Calgary web designers, we take the time to understand your business, your online goals, and the outcomes you expect to achieve. Using that information and relying on best practices and principles, we deliver web design that performs at the highest level and communicates effectively on every page. Connect with us today to learn more.
Calgary-headquartered Digital Lion, with secondary locations in Edmonton and Ottawa, is a digital marketing and design agency built with a purpose and passion to partner with its clients and provide first-class Web Development, Graphic Design, Logo Design and Online Marketing services. We work with clients across Canada, as well as worldwide, and are focused on being environmentally friendly and giving back to charities that we are passionate about. Our mission is to “Design a Better World®.” Browse our website, follow our social media channels, and contact us anytime for more information on how we can customize a package that meets your needs and suits your style.
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