Innovative Design Elements That Will Improve Your Website

By: Emma Miller

Websites are the heart and core of every modern business. Your entire marketing efforts and promotions are supposed to lead visitors to your website and convert them into customers. In a sense, a business website is there to seal the deal. However, no matter how good your marketing efforts are, if your website isn’t good enough, your potential customers will simply leave. In addition, online consumers have certain expectations when it comes to business websites, such as good functionality, speed, user-friendliness and so on.

These expectations change and evolve every time technological innovations set new standards, and every business that doesn’t keep up with new trends will soon fall behind. Simply put, if your website doesn’t meet or even exceed consumer expectations, they’ll find another website that will. That’s why having an impeccable website design is essential to your business success and you must constantly upgrade it in order to keep visitors engaged. Here are a few innovative web design elements that will benefit your business website.

Mobile optimization

Mobile traffic has overtaken desktop and people simply find browsing the web using their mobile devices more convenient. Business websites that aren’t mobile-friendly will not only lose customers, but will experience bad word-of-mouth from the consumers. In fact, 44% of consumers are more likely to tell their friends and family about bad website experience. Even though mobile friendliness has become an essential aspect in web design, there are still businesses that don’t have mobile-friendly websites and even if they do, those websites aren’t optimized properly.

It’s important to understand that mobile consumers also have expectations from mobile-friendly websites. For instance, website speed is imperative to visitors and 64% of them expect your pages to load in less than four seconds. That being said, 79% of consumers who encounter a slow and poorly optimized website will abandon it for good.

Responsive design

Mobile optimization isn’t new in website design, but the trends related to it constantly improve. If your visitors see a miniature desktop version of your website on their mobile devices, you can be sure they won’t be happy in the slightest. That’s why it’s important to implement a responsive design for your website nowadays. What responsive design does is adapt the version of your website to various devices your visitors may be browsing from.

Simply put, your website will adjust to the screen size and device usability accordingly. That way, not only will you meet the mobile user’s expectations, but it will also save you the trouble and money of maintaining two versions of the same website – one for mobile the other for desktop view. In addition, if you’re running an ecommerce business, you should know that 30% of all ecommerce is mobile commerce. That means you should consider a responsive ecommerce web design to help your customers navigate around your website and make purchases more easily.

Introduce personalization

Once your customers start navigating your website, it’s crucial to monitor their behavior, as well as their buying decisions. That way you can leverage the data gathered to introduce personalization for your website’s content. Nowadays, consumers prefer personalized offers, because they save them the trouble of searching through various products before they find what they need. Based on their previous visits, you can customize the offers and recommend products to your customers. That type of personalization is a great way to drive more engagement from customers and it’s also a good way to retain them.

Data monitoring should be a part of your web design if you want to retain customers, inspire loyalty and, of course, drive more sale through personalization. However, too much personalization may intimidate customers, due to the amount of information you’ve gathered on them. On the other hand, too little personalization and your customers won’t even notice it. Try to find a silver lining when implementing personalization that will work best for both you and your customers.

Leverage a content management system (CMS)

A content management system (CMS) has been around for some time now, but just like mobile optimization, it’s improving and becoming more pertinent to business websites. CMS allows you to make quick design changes and updates to your website, as well as update your content. Moreover, you can accomplish all that without having to learn web development or without coding skills.

This can be extremely beneficial to your business, especially if you’re keeping an eye on the latest trends and how your target audience adopts them, in order to meet customer demands and stay relevant to them. If visitors come across a website that’s outdated, they’ll most definitely leave. Make sure your website is updated and working up to speed, so that both your customers and first-time visitors aren’t disappointed.

A good web design is important both to you and your customers. After all, your business success depends on the experience your customers have on your website. Implementing innovative elements into your web design is essential in keeping up with the trends and ensuring your customers’ needs and expectations are met.

By Emma Miller