3 Tips for Web Design You Have to Follow
Most businesses know they need a home on the internet. A lot of them “Google Search” an online web site builder and go with whoever looks good. However, looks can be deceiving. Just because a site looks fancy and is full of bells and whistles that wow you, it doesn’t mean it’s going to wow the customer, or the search crawlers that allow your site (and your business!) to be found. Here are three often overlooked tips to website design that can help improve SEO results as well as make things easier on the visitor. Remember getting once you get people to your website you have to keep them there.
1. Ensure Images Are SEO-Friendly
Graphic designers can produce some amazing images that can really make your site stand out. As Rick Dejarnette writes, “image content is a powerful way to make an impression on a webpage.” But Google and other search engine’ crawlers can’t “read” pictures. Images with the text built into them do no good for your site or your search ranking.
There are a few easy steps you can take to make sure your images are SEO-friendly. First of all, put your text on top of the image. This allows not only for search engines to read more data but also gives you an added bonus of being able to re-use those quality background images for any message you might want to send.
Secondly, make sure you use alt text so that any image without text on it will also be picked up by search engines. Added to that, make sure you keep the file size small; no one likes a slow-loading page. Furthermore, a small tip for improving your images involves the file name. Make sure you use descriptive words for the file name of every image on your site.
2. Use Custom Fonts
This next tip can go hand-in-hand with changing the images on your site, specifically when it comes to the text. Custom fonts can be an incredibly effective way to spice up your site and give you more opportunity to provide search engines with data they can use. Take a look at these 25 examples.
Using custom fonts gives you an opportunity to present a unique aspect of your business through the text on your page. It also frees you to use your font on whatever background you need, including those fancy images you have on your site. Custom fonts give you much more flexibility in your design. Use CSS3 to bend or rotate your text to give it a PhotoShop look. They can be used literally everywhere, and relying on them means your site will have plenty of text for search engines to analyze.
3. Think of Your Page as a Magazine Cover
Unless you have a super-established brand and huge revenues, you’re not going to be able to get away with a home page like Amazon. When looking for how to best design your web page, head to the magazine rack.
The way you approach a website should be (almost) exactly the way a designer approaches a magazine cover. Showcase the one product that symbolizes the best of what your company can offer. More than likely, that’s why they are visiting your site anyway. Magazines present shoppers with the cover story to get them to explore more; the same goes for your site.
Don’t overload visitors with information or offers. Keep things simple and easy to logically navigate. Give visitors easy access to the most important areas on your page using your informative images combined with your custom fonts. Designing your site this way also allows for a great deal of SEO work to be implemented under the hood as well, with sitemaps, tags, menus, navigation labels, descriptions, and more.
Hopefully these tips get you thinking about how to best design your website! Need help designing your website? Visit my web design services page for more information on how we can design a branded website that not only looks good but generates traffic and revenue for your website.
