For any business, a prospective client’s first impression of your website matters. Within a few milliseconds, the visitor will either lose interest or continue browsing. Most importantly, if your company relies heavily on online transactions, it is therefore essential to invest in website design.
Consider your behaviour when you open a webpage for the first time. What elements catch your attention? Of course, one of the most important elements is how user-friendly it is to navigate. Perhaps another would be the colour scheme and layout. But in addition to these, there are design trends that you should seriously consider incorporating in your business website design. Here are the top four trends this year.
Long-form multimedia
This technique uses multimedia tools to tell a story about your company or brand. The purpose of this tool is to create an immersive experience where the audience learns more about the products and services you offer. Hire a professional web-design team like Digital Agency Sheffield to create a customised layout rich with videos, photos, sound, graphs, and illustrations. By engaging your customers, you are taking the first step in converting casual web visits into actual sales.
Mobile design
These days, more people browse the internet using their phones rather than desktop computers or laptops. Smartphones are convenient to use, and you carry it around wherever you are, which means every business should design a website that responds to smartphone configuration. Popular search engines like Google index mobile web pages first and if your company is not on top of the trend, you will experience low ranking in searches.
Integrate animation
Videos often get a bad reputation because they can slow the loading time of a website. Nevertheless, it is still an excellent idea to use videos and other forms of animation to make a website interesting and interactive, because a large part of internet traffic goes to videos. Instead of full-length videos, you can use short pops of animation such as sliding text and images.
Focus on company principles
While in some cases, it is helpful to have a professional graphic design team take the helm in producing the company website, it is still best if your business principles and philosophies shine through as a customer opens a web page. Put more emphasis on representing the brand values when conceptualising website design. A graphic designer may have a specific idea on what the website should look like, but at the end of the day, it may not cater specifically to your target market.
At the first stages of the design process, you need to define brand principles and values clearly. These will ensure that the resulting product is not some run of the mill, generic company website but custom-built and uniquely expressing the company’s standards. A website does not need all the bells and whistles. A company website should represent the company and at the same time offer an avenue for customers to connect, gather information, and get access to products and services in a smooth, convenient fashion.
Image: Pixabay.com
