It’s always important to have a strategy before you create anything. With marketing, it’s no different. Marketers use market research to understand their audiences so they know how to reach them and what will appeal to them. Whether you’re creating a web design for your business or personal site, the same principle applies.
The following guidelines can facilitate you create a web design that the people will like. For example, if you’re designing a website for parents of new babies, you wouldn’t want the homepage to be full of links to games and fun stories. You’ll be fine on your way to creating an efficient web design with these steps.
Understand your audience and know what they need
Before you create your website, you need to know who your audience is. What are their needs and wants? Do they enjoy reading about new baby items or fun stories? What are their interests? This could help you understand their expectations and make them satisfied.
Get feedback from your target audience – Once you have a good idea of what your target audience is looking for, get feedback from them and find out what they like and don’t like about marketing strategies that other companies use. It will be easier for you to create a web design that will engage them by understanding what resonates with them.
Create an attractive homepage – The homepage is the first thing visitors will see when they access your site. You want this page to be engaging, so people stay on the site and explore other pages within the site rather than just going back to search engine result pages (SERPs) or social media sites like Facebook.
Offer quality content – You want people to stick around and explore your site in detail, so offer quality content on all of your pages. Make sure there’s something interesting on each page, so visitors won’t be disappointed.
Keep it simple – The simpler, the better! If too many things are happening at once, visitors will get confused and frustrated, which could lead them to leave before exploring the rest of the site.
Determine the message you want to convey
You want to create a web design that’s going to appeal to your audience, but you’ll need to know the message you want to convey first. This will guide the rest of the process, from picking out the visuals and photos you’ll use down to the color scheme.
After you’ve determined what message you want your webpage to convey, it’s time to pick out an effective headline. A good headline should be short and powerful. Make sure it also aligns with your company values and mission statement. Include important keywords in the headline so people can find your site in search engines.
The About Us section should provide visitors with information about your business. It should be concise and descriptive–don’t make it too long or they’ll lose interest quickly. Instead of writing an essay about your company, simply sum up who you are with a few sentences.
It’s always important for visitors to have contact information for a company or website–especially when there are sales or promotions coming up! Create a Contact Us page where visitors can send mail, call, email, or fill out a form with their inquiry (or all four!).
If there isn’t anything interesting happening on your site–say no new products are coming soon–you may not have much content to share on social media or other marketing outlets.
Create a design that matches the target audience
This is the most important step. Designing a website for parents of new babies requires you to ask yourself a few questions. Is there a color scheme that would work well? What type of fonts should be used? Should you use any images? These are all questions you can answer based on your target audience.
Next, look at your site holistically. Find out what parts will appeal to your audience and which ones won’t. For example, if the target audience is parents of new babies, then don’t include links to games or fun stories on the homepage. This would only be distracting from the main point of the site and may confuse your visitors.
Choose the right fonts and colors
The fonts and colors you choose can be a game-changer for your website. Fonts that are easy to read will reduce the bounce rate and make people more likely to stay on your site longer. Colors influence emotions, so you’ll want to use colors that are comfortable and pleasing to your audience.
For instance, if you’re designing a website for parents of new babies, use light, calming colors like blue or green. Use light fonts that are easy to read, like Verdana, Helvetica, and Arial.
Get back to basics
The first step to creating an effective website design is to get back to the basics. One of the best ways to do it is by focusing on the fundamentals.
Start by establishing a goal for your site and creating a content plan. What are you trying to present? What do you want it to look like? Keep these questions in mind as you create your site, and make sure all the pages answer those questions. Your audience should be able to understand what your website is about from only looking at your homepage or landing page.
Once you have a content plan, it’s time to start designing your site with those goals in mind. One way to do this is by using personas. A persona is a character created based on information about demographic data, psychographics, and user behaviors. This can help you understand who your target audience is and how they will interact with your website design. For example, if you’re marketing products for children, you could create personas based on age ranges or genders so that each web page has something that appeals to that specific group of people.
Conclusion
In the end, it all comes down to one thing: how well you know your audience. If you don’t know enough about them, how will you know what to design for them? Market research is a vital piece of any successful marketing campaign and web design because it tells us what people want. These five steps can help with that. When you follow these guidelines and create a web design that fits your audience’s needs, you’ll be able to reach more people and increase your conversion rates.
A Required Aid for Web Designers 