Designing your website might sound like an impossible task as there are numerous directions and styles that you can choose, from sleek and modern to vibrant and playful. It would be best to find a subtle way of integrating your brand’s identity and personal style in the website’s final look. Doing this is necessary without compromising your site’s functionality and superb user experience. 

But with web design constantly evolving, you need to update yourself to stay ahead of the curve and outdo your competitors. If this your goal, then you’ve come to the right place. This guide will be taking you through helpful tips you should incorporate when designing your website in 2021to enhance its functionality and user-friendliness. 

1. Keep It Simple

Humans are inherently attracted to simplicity, so the last thing your website visitors want is having to navigate through your complex web design in search of the information they want. As such, you should maximize functionality when designing your website, hence making it easy to pass across your information to your users quickly and efficiently. 

After all, most of your visitors will barely read over all the content on your website but rather scan your web pages searching for specific sentences, keywords, or images. Knowing this, you can try here to learn how to tap into their emotions and capture their attention by being straightforward. 

While designing your website, you also need to remember that a user’s attention span keeps falling the longer they’re on your site. Therefore, you should try and cut down the word count the users are expected to read, as this improves how they evaluate and process your content. Some of the tips that can help you implement this include; 

• Add images: Including high-quality media features including vector art, beautiful pictures, or icons is an excellent alternative way of sharing your point. Check out the free animal Clipart by Vectorfair you can use.
• Use standard layouts: While it’s vital to differentiate your site from that of your competitors, you should always stick to using standard layouts. This is because users usually love familiarity, hence can be easily put off by non-standard web designs. It’s best to find other ways of making your site stand out. 
• Space your content: It’s also vital to improve your content’s readability, and you should do this by maximizing white spaces in between elements. By doing this, the design will look well-balanced and more spacious. 
• Add a call-to-action (CTA): If you wish your site visitors to perform a particular action, be it sign up or make a purchase, then including a CTA on your website’s homepage is necessary. 

2. Make Navigation Simpler 

Navigation is critical when designing your website. Therefore, your goal should be to make your site convenient and straightforward to navigate. With a clear structure, your website visitors won’t have difficulty accessing other areas of your site, such as the blog, products, and services. But if the site is disorderly, the users will have a frustrating experience due to the confusing interface. As a result, they’ll quickly leave your site and most likely never come back. 

To make the navigation interface a lot simpler, you should avoid poor web design practices such as vague hypertext and overstuffing your navigation. Otherwise, you’ll indirectly promote your competitors as your users will switch to them in search of an improved user experience. 

3. Observe Visual Hierarchy

Another important thing you should do while designing your site is observing the web design hierarchy principle. Doing this helps in presenting your content effectively and clearly. Because of this, you’ll manage to effortlessly capture the attention of your site visitors and directing them to the most crucial web page elements with falling significance. 

The main constituents of visual hierarchy you need to observe are; 

• Element placement: This entails using an appropriate site layout to direct your user’s eyes in the right direction. For instance, you can do this by positioning your company’s logo at the header or the CTA button right at the screen’s center. 
• Size and weight:  It involves emphasizing your site’s greatest assets, including the logo and business name, by making them bigger and more conspicuous. In most cases, users will start by being drawn to these bold and larger titles before moving on to the smaller texts on your site. 

4. Observe Your Site’s Loading Speed

Your site users have many things they can be doing with their valuable time, so the last thing they want to experience while on your site is slow loading speeds. If this isn’t achieved, they abandon your site quickly without a second thought. The only way to avoid this is by ensuring your website’s loading speeds don’t exceed five seconds.  

To optimize your site’s loading speeds, avoid using too many larger items when designing your site. This is because higher resolution videos or images drastically impact the loading speeds by affecting the duration it takes for users to download data from your website. Moreover, choose a reliable web host server and a website builder that doesn’t comprise your site’s loading speeds.   

5. Include Testimonials

In 2021, there are more sites online than ever before. So, how do people determine which are trustworthy and which are scams? Reviews. If you have collected positive customer feedback, you can take advantage of it by adding it to your website. When users see reviews from real people, they’re more likely to trust and therefore purchase your products. 

However, it can be a challenge to add these testimonials to your website so that they’re effective.

First, determine the format of testimonial—text or video—you want added into your website. Video testimonials have been determined to be the most effective because they keep the viewer’s attention for longer. Videos also create a stronger human connection because viewers can see real people and hear their voices.

If you don’t have any video testimonials, consider adding a case studies page to your site, where you can discuss the things you did to help your clients. You can also use text testimonials, which build trust effectively with users. 

You can add testimonials to your homepage, service page, or create a separate testimonial page, which you can add into your navigation bar. As long as these testimonials are genuine, their addition should improve user experience and establish trust among potential buyers or consumers. 

When adding these testimonials to your website, be sure to add the customer’s name, photo, their job title, and the company they work for. This will ensure that the reviews appear to be written by real people.

Takeaway 

A website is a great way to pass across your brand’s message to your clients and visitors.  As we’re in 2021 already, you know that your site needs to be responsive and beautiful irrespective of the industry. If you didn’t know how to do this, follow the tips discussed above to help you develop an excellent site for your company.