‘75% admit to making a judgement about the credibility of a website based on it’s website design.’
Isn’t that a scary thought? Luckily, with so many free website templates on sites like Wix and WordPress, including plugins to cover everything from a Twitter feed to a subscription box, gone are the days where web designers can charge an extortionate fee. The market is just far too competitive!
For example, you can hire a website designer for as little as £25 an hour on Upwork! But for the startups and entrepreneurs who would like to test their creative abilities and create their own, let’s take a look at my top essential elements all websites should have.
A fantastic homepage is broken down into 3 elements
- Content
- Tech
- Visual design
Ideally, your homepage design needs to captivate your visitors, educate them on your brand and encourage them to click onto other pages.
The 6 Essential Elements Of A Website
‘Above the fold’ is a term meaning the first page your visitors will see when they land on your homepage. This is why it’s so important to make the design as clutter free and user-friendly as possible.
- Social Media Buttons – Social media buttons placed at the top of your homepage allow your users to see you regularly engage and have a social media presence. When it comes to followers, numbers are vital, and a company that has built up thousands of followers tends to be viewed as more trustworthy.
- About Tab – I would recommend this to be the first tab on your homepage. What do you do? How does your service and product differ from others? What are the benefits to the customer? More importantly, what is your vision and why have you decided your product/service could make such an impact on a possibly over saturated market?
- Font – Fonts have been proven to greatly influence how a visitor feels about your brand. I remember our I.T tutor at school drumming into us that a formal letter had to be in the font of ‘Arial!’. Thankfully we are a lot more opened minded today and instead value the ability to make a font unique to our brand. Just avoid using too many writing styles on your homepage. Try to use bold or headers to make your point instead.
- The Pop up – Pop ups have the ability to create warm leads, or have your visitors leaving the page within 10 seconds out of annoyance! I recommend setting your pop up to appear at least a minute after the visitor has landed on your platform.
The aim of a pop up is to create warm leads by visitors adding their email address and subscribing to a monthly newsletter. You can then market special offers on a monthly basis to try to close the sale down. After all, they were interested enough to sign up to you in the first place, you’re halfway there!
- Pricing – A recent client told us they had searched the internet for an idea on how much it would cost to purchase a social media package. Out of the 10 websites they visited, only one was transparent enough to show their prices and as luck would have it, that site was ours – Designated PA. Worrying about your competitors seeing your pricing is one thing, but having potential customers leave instantly as they do not want to email or call is quiet another.
- Contact Details – Have you lost count of the amount of times you’ve searched high and low for contact details on a site, just to find them in small print at the very bottom of the page? Surely the point is to make you as accessible to potential customers as possible? Think about creating a separate tab for your contact details above the fold.
Are you concerned how user friendly your site is? How about the quality of your visuals and your content? Get in touch with our digital marketing team today and let’s create a unique and user friendly platform that sets you apart from your competitors.
Contact – Info@designatedpa.com or telephone us on +44 (0)207 952 1460