How Smart WordPress Website Design Can Help Your Business

We all know it’s important to have an attractive and accessible website for your business. But how can you create a great WordPress website design that your clients or customers will love?

There are a lot of resources that you can use to identify the key ingredients of a top-notch website design. There are even tons of tutorials to help you if you plan to do it yourself.

Whether you’re building the site on your own or working with us to design it for you, it’s important that you’re able to identify the key traits that will make your website stand out, get you noticed, and allow your business to thrive online. Here’s how smart WordPress website design can help your business.

It Showcases Your Brand

When you create a great website, your brand is front and center. Your site will serve as a reminder for your prospects as to who you are, and what you stand for. It’s not just about showing your product or service – It’s about leaving your prospective customers or clients or fans with an overwhelmingly positive impression of your business.

You’ll want to use your site as a tool to showcase your company’s values, philosophy, and culture. How you design your website, and the details that you add or leave out, will say a lot about what your company stands for.

If you have an e-commerce website, keeping things simple and easy is even more important to your site’s success. The better the overall shopping experience, the more likely customers will remember your brand and come back. A fast-loading site with a simple navigation and an intuitive and easy-to-use shopping cart will keep your visitors engaged, and they will no doubt return another day to shop your online store!

A clean, smart design will also give your visitors the cue that your business cares about the details, and also cares about its clients or customers.

Separates You from the Competition

A smart WordPress website design will give you a competitive edge. Visitors want to be engaged; they want to see something different and unique. Don’t be like everyone else! Be memorable. Even better – Be unforgettable.

Your customers or clients don’t want to search for similar products on a bunch of websites that all look the same. The amazon-clones out there are numbing their brains and they crave something better. Something more experiential. So, you need to do your research to make sure you’re not re-using a template that’s been used 1000 times before and that makes you indistinguishable from the competition.

One thing we always recommend is checking out the competition’s websites to see what they do well or what could be done better. Adding elements like transitions, fades and other little touches and micro-interactions makes your site stand out and makes your business seem more special to a savvy buyer. Pay attention to the details. Sweat the small stuff. It matters.

The moral of the story? Trying to improve on your competition’s website while adding your own unique spin is good. Giving your customers something they’ve never seen before is great.

It Improves SEO

The better your design, the better your SEO will be. Well, sort of. A great design with bad SEO is still bad for business… but a great design with good SEO trumps all. Remember that your design encompasses more than just your layout and colors – it incorporates a lot of elements that are good for attracting search traffic.

A smart WordPress website design will feature enough well-written copy to describe your company and its products and services. All that text will act as the keywords needed to improve your searchability. This text will be put together in a clean, easy-to-understand hierarchy ie H1, H2, H3 and so on and so forth, making it easy for both search engines and users to understand what you’re saying.

In addition to the text, you’ll have images with alternate text and captions that adds to your SEO score. Those images are more than just eye-candy to your customers; they give you another opportunity to add keywords for search engines to crawl.

There are also additional elements that your clients won’t see. Using the right theme and plugins can improve your SEO dramatically. There are loads of themes out there – If you’re going to DIY it, make sure to grab a popular theme, and we would recommend staying away from anything that’s not a paid premium WordPress theme.

A smart WordPress website design also means that your site is responsive and fast. A faster-loading site not only has a way better chance of ranking higher, it also keeps your visitors happy, and reduces your bounce rate. Responsive design means your site is easy to read on desktops as well as on mobile devices & tablets, which also improves your Google ranking.

Keeps Customers Scrolling

An engaging design will keep your customers on your site longer. Let’s face it – good website design is fun to use, and it’s easy on the eyes. Bad design not only sets the wrong tone for your brand, it can often be frustrating and increase your bounce rate, which equals people leaving your site quicker.

Great design doesn’t just end on your landing page. When all pages within your site are well thought out, your visitors will go deeper and explore other pages. There are tons of ways to add interest to your design. Adding little interactive details to your site scrolling, like subtle parallax and row color fades and hover effects are all great ways to keep your users eyes and brains fixated. Whatever you do, don’t overdo it! Remember when Flash came out? It was great when used tastefully, but when it found its way into the wrong hands… Yikes!

A smart WordPress website design will also feature just the right amount of text to engage your visitors. You want to give them something to think about, but not so much that they feel like they just cracked open the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It’s a delicate balance. One thing to remember is to break up the text with images so that your visitors get a mental break, and so they continue reading. Breaking up the copy with good headings is key, and you can also use bullet points when you’re trying to convey important pieces of information quickly and easily. Icons can also be a good communication tool, but again, don’t overdo it!

The bottom line is that when you break up all of your information in a simple and coherent manner, it will keep your visitors reading and hold their interest. Add in simple scrolling effects and transitions, and you’ll be on your way to converting them from a casual browser into a raving fan!

Provides Easy and Intuitive Navigation

Navigation doesn’t have to be boring, but it does have to be functional. Simple navs are great and commonplace among most newer WordPress websites, but you can level up your menu if you feel inclined. You can be creative by combining multiple menus like a centered header nav with a fullscreen hamburger menu to keep things interesting, but still easy to use.

Ensuring that the user experience on your site is absolutely top-tier starts with a well thought out navigation system.

The easier it is to navigate your website, the more likely it is that customers will find what they need. A stellar user experience on your website could mean the difference between a short visit and repeat business. No one likes to fiddle around for 5 minutes to find something they should be able to find in 5 seconds! If in doubt, simplify, simplify, simply! And then simplify again!

Also, don’t forget about the obvious things – like displaying your contact information clearly for people who want to hop on the phone right away and engage in business with you. Try and audit your site from the point of view of a client or customer that wants to do business with you. See if there is anything going on that could impede them in any way, and get rid of it!

Smart WordPress Website Design Will Improve Business

The more effort, planning and thought you put into creating a great WordPress website design, the better this will reflect on your brand, and the more you’ll stack the deck in your favor that your website will be all that you want it to be and more! Like most things in life, what you put in is what you get out. A smart design is not only a great representation of your company and something to be proud of – It’s an opportunity to grow your business online.

Talk to us about your next WordPress web design project. We’ll work our butts off to create something amazing together, and we’ll make sure to knock it out of the park for you!