When creating a website, there are many features that fall under the “nice to have” umbrella, and in most instances, creative freedom can be taken when designing your site. It is meant to be a reflection of your brand after all.
There are, however, certain things that are 100% necessary if you want your website to perform well and benefit both you and your audience. Today, we’ll be exploring six design features every website needs. If you come across anything on this list that yours doesn’t have, we suggest taking action on it ASAP.
An Easy-To-Navigate User Interface
The first and most important design feature all websites need is an easy to navigate user interface. Certain principles must be followed in order to achieve this, so if you’re not up to date with the latest website conventions, we suggest engaging the services of a creative design studio to ensure everything flows smoothly.
Strong Calls To Action
It doesn’t matter how pretty or functional your site is if it doesn’t serve its main purpose – bringing in new and repeat customers. Because of this, it is vital that your website features strong calls to action wherever they are required.
It’s perfectly fine to simply have a sentence suggesting customers call you for further information at the end of a blog, but on a home page or sales section, you really need something with a bit more oomph if you want to grab attention and convert.
Responsiveness
Once you’ve got your interface set up nicely for desktop users, it’s time to ensure that it is fully responsive on mobile and tablet devices. In the first quarter of 2021, mobile phones accounted for over half of all web traffic (that’s before we factor in tablets), so having a design that suits their screens really is non-negotiable in today’s day and age.
A Way For Customers To Contact You
Speaking of contacting you, customers can’t and won’t do this if they cannot easily find a way to get in touch. Reaching out to you should be a quick and easy process, and these days, a contact page simply isn’t enough. Consider installing widgets that allow customers to make a call with the press of a button, and ensure contact forms are placed in all appropriate places on your site.
Proper Headings And Sections
If it’s easy to get lost on your site, you’re going to lose customers. For this reason, one of the most important design features on any website is proper headings and easy to distinguish sections. This ties in with having an easy-to-navigate interface because, no matter how simple it is to get around your site, people aren’t going to engage if they can’t understand your content.
A Beautiful Blog
Speaking of understanding your content, the final point in today’s piece relates to having a site blog. Blogs are a great way to build authority and engage your audience. Another benefit is that search engines absolutely love them in terms of SEO. For these three key reasons, we believe that a blog is an essential part of any good website.
Remember, it is also important that your blog is visually engaging to help prevent readers from switching off. We suggest following magazine styling in this section, as long as it fits your brand.
Does your website have all six of these key design features? If you answered yes, that’s great, but if your response was no, it’s certainly worth putting in the time or outsourcing to get these things up and running.
