Website Design Tips from Marketcircle’s Graphic Designer

Scaling / April 23, 2013 / Admin

No one likes spending thousands of dollars on Adwords or spending countless hours in SEO efforts without seeing results. Traffic, considered a key ingredient to a website’s success, is only effective if the website they land on is well designed. The combination of high traffic and great design are essential in converting visitors into paying customers.

What you want to avoid is spending a ton of effort to drive traffic to your website only to have visitors arrive and instantly bounce because your website is unattractive or they have no idea what action to take (usually because there’s too much clutter or too many options to choose from). All your hard work spent driving traffic to your website will be wasted if you don’t keep in mind a single key design philosophy: Simplicity.

Our graphic designer, Alvina Fung has put together a few website tricks that you should consider when designing your company’s website. The idea is to keep your branding strong and consistent while leaving a lasting first impression for your website visitors.

Our website was heavily influenced by Apple. Apple has more white space, large images and accompanied text that isn’t too long. I’d say the most important thing to keep in mind when designing a website is alignment and cutting back on the content to get your message across as concisely as possible.” -Alvina

Whether you are designing the website yourself or outsourcing the work to a web designer, here are 6 important tips to keep in mind:

1. Appropriate colours and fonts:

  • font size/style helps with legibility
  • use the same colours to reinforce your branding
  • keep your colours and font style as minimal as possible, so it looks simple and cohesive
  • colour evokes emotion/actions. From a design standpoint green means go and red means stop. Make sure you test this theory when choosing the colour for action buttons because sometimes colours you don’t expect to get many clicks will out perform the one you thought would do best.

2. Spelling & Grammar:

  • always double check for spelling and grammar mistakes because it’s the first impression that counts

3. Cohesive and strong branding:

  • make sure the message is concise and not confusing to your target audience
  • make use of your branding colours/icons to reinforce memorability (when appropriate, you don’t want an overkill)

4. Use of negative space:

  • provide breathing room for your content (text or images)
  • just because there’s space doesn’t mean you need to fill it up
  • provide page breaks
  • use white space (like Apple does)

5. Contact information:

  • make sure it’s easily accessible and not hard to find (usually present on your homepage)
  • provides credibility

6. Alignment:

  • guides the reader’s eyes
  • if the page is centred, keep it consistent or it will look messy and not legible

Your website is your first impression to prospective customers so make sure it’s a good one. If you don’t have a design background (as a lot of us don’t) then hire a professional. It’s really worth budgeting for when setting up your company’s online presence. We hope this helps you as you start your business or if you are looking to improve your current company or personal website.

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