5 simple website design tips to create a professional online presence

While ranking high on search engines can involve a lot of moving parts, your website’s design can make or break its online presence. From the layout to its loading speed, ease of use, and how professional it looks, several design factors can affect the visibility of your website online, how much traffic it attracts, and how much of that traffic is converted into sales.

With this in mind, here are five simple web design tips to create a professional online presence.

1. Use a Clean, Simple, and Easy to Navigate Design

Nothing can be more intimidating to a website visitor than dealing with a page that requires sifting through tons of information and (irrelevant ads) before locating what they are interested in. Whether they found the link from organic search results, followed it from a blog, or typed it on the address bar, one thing is for sure.

Web visitors are easily put off by complex, cluttered websites, or pages that are difficult to navigate. It’s best to avoid excessive graphics and stick to a basic color scheme. A clean and simple user interface also minimizes clutter and helps ensure that visitors can easily navigate the site so they can easily find what they're looking for.

2. Remove the Background from Icons and Images in Your Sidebar or Header

Using high-quality images can help improve a site’s visibility and ranking on Google, while also improving its click-through rate. But how you use them can also impact your site’s loading speed and overall performance. If you're looking to improve your website's performance, then removing the background from icons and images can be a great place to start.

Thankfully, you can do this easily using a photo editing tool called background remover, a widely used feature by professionals when looking to create a painting from a photo online.

By eliminating sidebar and header image and icon backgrounds, you can give an instant boost to your site pages’ load time, improve online visibility, and boost traffic. It can also give your site a clean and polished look that appears professional and stands out from the competition.

3. Make Sure Your Website Is Responsive So It Can Be Accessed On All Devices

A responsive site is simply a site that is designed to work well on a variety of devices, including mobile phones and tablets, as well as PCs. It’s a critical step before you even think of developing a mobile app for your website to supplement your business.

Often featuring a simplified layout, a responsive site allows the visitor to easily read and navigate through despite the size of the screen they are accessing from.

However, the fact that it uses a simple layout doesn’t necessarily make it easy to design without basic web design skills or using a skilled web designer. But there’s one simple thing you can do.

When choosing a website designer to make your website responsive, remember to ask them about design elements such as using:

• A fluid grid ­ – This allows automatic resizing of content to suit the visitor’s screen size.
• CSS3 media queries – These allow change of layout based on screen size based on set specifications.
• Responsive images – This feature ensures that images are sized using a percentage-based width and resized to suit the user’s screen upon access.
• Responsive design file structure – This means that the CSS, JavaScript, and images should all be stored in separate folders, making it easier to change the styles or scripts for different screen sizes.

4. Include Social Media Buttons and Call to Action

At the very least, a typical website should have an “about us” page as well as a “contacts” or “contact us” section. These pages can help attract trust from search engine crawlers while demonstrating legitimacy and attracting engagement from visitors. But in an age when people are addicted to social media and smartphones, nothing quite does the trick better when it comes to igniting engagement and sparking curiosity than social signals.

Besides promoting your presence on social networks, clickable social media widgets also provide site visitors with an easy way to share your content with their contacts across various channels, which can help boost SEO, increase traffic to your site, create new leads, and attract new returning customers.

5. Use Call to Action (CTAs)

CTAs can basically help compel visitors into taking actions like subscribing to a newsletter, making a purchase, scheduling an appointment, or even referring your site to a friend. They are great at improving conversion rates when used wisely.

With the few tips above, designing a professional website can be simpler than you previously thought. Whether you’re using platforms like Wix and WordPress or simply hiring an expert web designer, these tips will keep you informed on what to look for in an optimized website for a professional online presence.