Web Designers: Essentials for Effective Web Design

Effective web design is the design and development of a website that meets the requirements of visitors and search engines alike.

The main visitor requirements include:

• A template design, color scheme, and layout that appeals to the main age group, gender, and socioeconomic status of visitors.
• On the home page, it’s instantly clear what the website is about (visitors don’t want to spend time trying to figure out what the website is about).
• The website is easy to navigate, requires a minimum of clicks to find what they are looking for, and the design is intuitive.
• Contact details, including phone number, are easy to come by (should be clearly located on every page!)
• No pop-ups that are distracting and full of marketing hype.
• Skim readable text, meaning text or content that is easy to read quickly, doesn’t contain large blocks of text, and has an easy-to-read font size and font (not too small or crazy!)
• The website portrays “trust” (the most important thing) and is nice as people buy from other people. Pictures/photos and videos of the business owner or staff member, testimonials, privacy policy, company establishment time, membership in recognized trade and industry associations, recognized business partner logos, etc.

Search engines, when ranking websites within their search results/lists, give preference to websites:

• Where visitors stay longer than on other websites (videos, flash rotating headers, virtual speakers, good amounts of highly informative content, lots of pages, forms and subscription boxes to fill in) all help to keep visitors on the website by to lengthen
• With integrated blogs; since blogs are generally a good source of new text
• They have a low visitor bounce rate, that is, they have high visitor retention and a high number of clicks on the website.
• Which have text links instead of graphic links
• That have content over “the fold” on a page, i.e. the top half of the page

Websites that are not produced with search engines in mind are just eBrochures. Given the massive demand and rapid growth of online searches through major search engines, there is a huge opportunity to get leads and sales through a website that is well suited to search engine requirements. .