12 Pro Tips to Leverage Your Website Design for Online Businesses

Learn how to leverage your website design for business growth, because there’s more to it than simply putting up a website.

When do you think it is time to leverage your website design for your online business?

Have you ever asked yourself how long does it take for your visitors to recognize the type of business you are doing?

Could they reach any section they need immediately?

Have you made your pricing layout easy to understand?

Or, have you ever analyzed your bounce rate?

Yes, your website has to be professional, but if you’re still having problems converting visitors, there is something wrong. The design of your website has to imply what the core of your business is and how it can facilitate and improve your customers’ lives. 

Why Is Website Design Important?

You might ask yourself why you should leverage your website design for your online business. Most brands and businesses have moved to creating an online presence for themselves. Creating a presence online isn’t easy, so leveraging it to improve your business may seem too difficult. But, if you are not using your website to promote your offers, services, and products, you are risking the revenue of your business.

Your website can give you more than you think. If you are a sales expert of a traditional business, just be aware that the sooner you represent your brand through your website in the online world, the better. Simply put your customers are online and to real them in and convert them — you need to be in front of their eyes.

How to Leverage Your Website Design for Online Businesses?

Now let’s get to know the tips that help you leverage your website design for your online business:

1. Map Out Your Buyer’s Journey 

Like any project proceeding without a plan is just no good. You need to map out your web design process or you’ll just be creating chaos where you invest budget and time, and none of your goals will be achieved.

Plan a clear map of your sales funnel. To be specific, you should predict what needs your visitors have, what attracts them to your website based on their needs, how you can keep them on your website, and how it is possible to convert them to buyers. Think of the number of pages you need, the type of content, and the offers that can increase your conversion rate. 

When you have everything in mind and plan in advance for them, it is highly probable that you get your desired result.

2. Add Social Buttons

Social share buttons allow your visitors to pass your content, e.g. articles, to their friends or colleagues. If you do not include them, your content misses the opportunity of being shared. Social buttons are crucial in the sense that they can lead the traffic on your website to your different social media. 

Take Instagram for example. One way to grow your Instagram followers is to use Instagram followers apps. Another way is to lead your interested customers to follow you on Instagram. Just make it available for them and wait for them to appear as new followers on Instagram.

Here are the social buttons on the Dolce & Gabbana website:

Source: Dolcegabbana.com

3. Include CTA Buttons

Call-to-action or CTA buttons should be there on your website to enable your visitors to find their way. In other ways, CTA buttons are the gateways to where you want your visitors to be. If you want to leverage your website design, choose a reasonable size and contrasting color for your CTA buttons and place them somewhere that is easy to notice.

Without CTA buttons, your visitors may get lost which results in their frustration. So, do not make your visitors leave your website by simply implementing CTA buttons where necessary. 

Some instances of an inviting CTA button is to download the ebook, sign up now for the online course, see pricing, click here for more information, watch now, check out the offer, see all services, etc.

Zara has chosen a simple and easy CTA button to lead its visitors to the page where the new products are displayed:

Source: Zara.com

5. Use The Right Visual Content

Always keep in mind that a website page is not fully textual like an academic essay or a lengthy article in a newspaper. Your website must include some visual content to aesthetically and visually influence your visitors. On the other hand, the visuals should show clearly what you are aiming for your website. Visuals can be divided into different categories such as photos, animations, videos, graphs, diagrams, infographics, illustrations, etc. 

When using photos, you should be aware that adding random image is dangerous for your website. This is due to the fact that unrelated images can make your visitors get confused and leave your website. Choose large, relevant, and high-resolution images for your landing pages and leave a great first impression on your visitors. This will make them trust you, and stay there reading your textual content and complete the sales funnel perhaps. 

6. Navigation

To define website navigation, we should say that website navigation enables your visitors to comfortably flow between your website pages without getting frustrated. So, the navigation of your website has a direct effect on making your visitors stay. 

If your website has disorganized navigation, your website visitors cannot find what they are looking for. So, decrease your bounce rate and increase your website users’ experience by providing good navigation for your website. 

7. Add Sections on Your Homepage

Each homepage needs to have certain sections. However, adding too many useless sections without giving any particular information just wastes the time of your visitor. Among the suggested sections below, you should only have the necessary ones that fit in your business. Of course, sections on a homepage are not limited to these items only. But, let’s just see some of the sections that you can add:

• Value proposition
• Services/Products
• Projects
• About Us
• Contact Us
• Testimonials
• Success Stories
• Blog/Resources

In addition, your website needs some white space, or negative space, in case you want to improve the readability and content prioritization.  

8. Make Your Website Mobile Responsive

If your website is not responsive to smartphones, then you will lose a huge amount of possible visitors as there are many smartphone users surfing the internet. To leverage your website design, you have to care about the needs and interests of your visitors, you should also consider mobile users who interact with your website. This is how your visitors will enjoy the mobile experience. 

Remember mobile application testing because it is just as important as website testing.

9. Keep on Testing

As a website and business owner, you have to test your website to see if everything works well in your sales funnel. In other words, testing helps you understand if your website pages are working properly. 

Consider that you have a travel website that sells flight tickets as one of its services. There are fields to be filled by the customer regarding the travel information. For instance, travel date(s), cities they are traveling from and to, number of travelers, and other options such as hotel booking, etc. You should check if all the fields and options are working and if all the airports in your business area are included. This is just the first step. You should go on until the completion of the purchase up to the point where the ticket confirmation email is sent to the customer. Then, you can confidently say that your website works efficiently.  

Here is an example by Flix Bus:

Source: global.flixbus.com

There are website tools such as A/B tests and multivariate tests that you can use if you want to automate the process of testing. In addition, your other solution is to set up heat maps on your website to track and check your visitors.

10. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Generate Leads 

If you need to have leads for your website, you should know what the target market demands in your niche. Think of the probable needs they might have and the questions they might ask. They usually search for their needs and questions. Isn’t it superb if your website appears on the first page of Google search results and gives them what they need? This, however, requires you to foresee their needs, as said before. Therefore, you will be one step ahead of your competitors if you have made the correct predictions. 

Remember that each search engine – Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. – has its own algorithms and you need to do a lot of research to see what makes a blog post or website page appear on the first page of that search engine. 

You can’t really leverage your website design without implementing a solid SEO strategy or at least having a basic understanding of SEO. Recognizing your audience, their needs, interests, and problems can help you find your place significantly. Then, it is time to optimize your website for your desired search engine using the keywords and key phrases that you have found. So, just go on enjoying your ranking on the search engine and the lead that visits your website. 

The greatest thing is that, since the generated lead already has some affiliations with your website, it is highly likely that they continue their way on your conversion funnel and turn into a customer. 

11. Produce Problem Solving Content

As a business owner or marketing specialist, you definitely know the role that content can play on your website. It can hugely affect the number of incoming leads to your website. Creating content is indeed important, but it has to be proper content that addresses the needs and requirements of your target audience. This is how you can make your content stand out.

You cannot contact directly to solve the problems or meet the needs of your audience one by one. Therefore, you should prepare a long list of problems and needs and write the solution to them on specific pages of your website. If you make your content SEO-friendly, you can easily appear on the first page of the search engine when the audience searches for a solution. Therefore, you have provided solutions to your audience, increased your website traffic, and perhaps increased your conversions.

12. Fix 404 Errors

If you have a large website, it is highly probable that some of the pages are not working. But how can you know if there are such pages on your website? Do your visitors or customers report you? We do not think so.

Source: Unsplash

So, to tackle the problem, you should be constantly checking the pages of your website. For instance, if you have a blog, it is better if you tell your content marketing team to report you if the pages welcome their visitors with a 404 error! It is a super easy task because your content team is always using many links as internal links in new articles. Then, you should assign a fixing task to your IT team and everything will be fine again. 

In case you ignore these errors, the result is clear; you will lose your customer’s to be. Because they find it hard to trust you while you have simple technical issues on your website. 

Conclusion

You can maximize your profits from your online sales in different ways. One way is to leverage your website design to create a better user experience. The tips and elements explained above can assist you on the way to reach your sales goals. Remember to always take care of and pay attention to your website because it is the means through which you earn revenues. Good luck!