When it comes to the appearance of your website, it affects more than your ability to make a positive first impression. In fact, it’s one of the main determiners of your average conversion rate. By observing the way in which your website works or looks, your visitors are directly evaluating the performance of your entire business. Going for a design layout or trend that’s deemed as somewhat less niche-appropriate, you’ll cause a substantial damage to your branding efforts as a whole. Same goes for a scenario where something’s wrong with your website from the technical standpoint. All in all, in order to boost your conversion rate, you need to take special care of your visuals. Here are several tips to help you out.

  1. Responsive Web Design

It’s very easy to spot a non-responsive or at least non-mobile-friendly website, especially in an era where people use a plethora of devices to access your domain. The greatest problem with this is actually finding a way to resolve this issue in the right way. This is where opinions differ and while some suggest that you should go for responsive, others prefer looking for an adaptive website layout. The latter implies that you have six different screen sizes made in advance and hope that your website will recognize the device used to access it, so that it can display the right screen size.

The downside of the latter solution lies in the fact that adaptive design takes longer to develop and it costs considerably more. Even its cost-effectiveness is often disputed, seeing as how about 90 percent of the time that mobile users spend online is through apps and not browsers. For those with a bit more substantial budget, going for a responsive website and an app is a better alternative than going for an app and adaptive web design. Those who are forced to choose just one are probably best off going with responsive web design.

  1. Introduce Yourself

Formally introducing yourself is not just a matter of politeness, it’s an issue of pragmatism. After all, you can’t just assume that everyone who landed on your page is already aware of your brand. Sure, they might have a clue about your industry or some of the services you provide but assuming they’re just there to look at the catalog or search for contact info is too overconfident. Therefore, when designing your website, you need to find a way to state your company’s name, purpose and even hint on your offer before presenting your audience with a CTA button.

This last part can be particularly tricky and might require a no small amount of experience in the field of web development. While larger companies looking to establish their online presence may feel content going with professional web development agencies, as an SMB or a startup, you’re probably better off employing services of freelance web designers from Sydney. In this way, you can get niche-appropriate, audience-centric introduction you needed all along.

  1. Assigning a Visual Priority

The key of inbound marketing is to make the exploration of your website as intuitive as possible, yet, doing so is not a simple thing. After all, what seems logical to some may be completely impossible to comprehend to others. This is why you need to learn how to assign visual priority. For instance, if all of your text is in one font and a single sentence is in a significantly larger font (in bold or italic), your readers will automatically assume that this particular segment is special and they won’t be wrong. In other words, contrast is your strongest weapon. This is the part that often gets misinterpreted, seeing as how there are various forms of contrast for you to explore. Bigger versus smaller, neutral versus bold are just some of the examples.

  1. Whitespace

The next issue you need to pay a special attention to is the use of whitespace. The more whitespace you use; the fewer resources your website requires by default. In turn, your page takes a shorter time to load and your website seems more responsive. Aside from this, your site also appears more aesthetic, seeing as how it gains on readability, even mobile-friendliness. When your layout is packed with clickable elements, it’s fairly easy for an average user to click on something by an accident. With enough whitespace, such a thing is highly unlikely to happen. Needless to say, your whitespace probably shouldn’t be white, unless this is the theme that you’ve opted for.

In Conclusion

At the end of the day, the appearance of your website is just one aspect of the visual brand behind your business. In a situation where your business exists only in the digital environment (e-commerce or a similar industry), it is as vital as the neatness or the organization of someone’s actual retail store. For this reason alone, it is a factor that you simply can’t afford to neglect. In other words, this is not the place where you should try to save effort or resources.