What Are The Requirements For a Modern Web Design That Is a Sales Driver?

Quality web design must first and foremost engage the user. The amount of time people are willing to spend with online content is decreasing rapidly every year. If you don’t capture a person’s attention within the first 5-10 seconds, there’s a good chance they’ll leave and never come back.

Once you’ve got their attention, you need to quickly evoke the strongest emotion possible and intuitively guide them to the desired conversion.  This goes hand in hand with smart site architecture and strategic positioning.

To top it all off, the web design should reflect your core brand values, be consistent with your brand identity and, most importantly, differentiate you from the competition. Combining all these requirements into one design is not always easy. But as long as you follow a few basic rules, it won’t be too hard.

Follow the basic rules of UX and UI

The foundation of good web design is a well-designed skeleton, the architecture of the whole site.

• What sub-pages will you have in the menu?
• How will the different content sections follow each other?
• What will you highlight most in your communication?

Getting these attributes right is extremely important. Sometimes even small differences in menu layout can improve or worsen conversion rates by more than 1%.

Practical tip: It’s rare to get world-class UX and UI design right the first time. The key is to test multiple versions and choose the one that delivers the best results. Tools such as Hotjar or Smartlook are very useful in this regard. They allow you to accurately assess user behaviour on your site. They show you where they click, where they spend the most time and where they get “lost”. Based on this data, you can fine-tune the structure and design of your site to perfection.

People don’t read, they scan

The days when you could have an endless paragraph of text on the web and people would be happy to read it are long gone. When a person arrives at a web page, they scan it in a few seconds by first glancing at it. It is only when they have an interest in the content that they will read the text.

Your job, therefore, is to catch their attention. For this reason, it is a good idea to place more graphic elements and elements in the upper parts of the website that catch the eye and motivate people to scroll further and become more interested in what you have to offer. Simply put, you need to create a wow effect. You can do this with:

• stylish visuals
• a short emotional video
• eye-catching headlines with interesting information or benefits

Our advice: We have very good experience with dynamic elements on websites. Whether it’s animation between sections of content or graphic elements that rotate, scroll or otherwise move. These elements encourage visitors to keep scrolling and discover what you have to offer.

Choosing the right colours and CTA elements

Colour can evoke different emotions. It’s important to base your design on your brand identity, but also try to play with the psychology of colour.
Study what emotions each colour evokes and try to choose the ones that best represent your brand.

Every year, new trends in web colour are introduced. For example, bold, unconventional colours, cartoon elements and soft pastels are very popular today. The frosted effect is also popular. Last but not least, dark mode, which can be either fixed or activated via a button on the website, is becoming increasingly popular.

Remember, when it comes to colour, it is best to combine related shades of the same colour that go well together and create a harmonious whole. At the same time, it is extremely important to differentiate CTA elements (such as buy or contact buttons) from the rest of the content with a stronger contrasting colour.

Fine-tune the content

In modern web design, the old adage “less is more” applies. Try to keep the content to a minimum, removing all the “sauces” and unnecessary sentences that just take up space and add no real value to the visitor. Communicate as clearly and concisely as possible.

There should be enough space between text, graphics and sections to give the site a light and airy feel. Don’t try to cram too many elements into a small area. This will cause the user to get unnecessarily lost and miss important information.

Fonts also play an important role. Make a clear distinction between headings, subheadings and the text itself. Highlight the most important information and benefits to grab the visitor’s attention at a glance. Enhance textual content with images or graphics. Use appropriate icons to “break up” the flow of text and highlight your benefits.

Include lots of CTA elements in the design, especially colourful, distinctive buttons that guide the visitor to the desired action. But be careful not to overdo the number of them. If you ask a person to do 5 different things, they’re unlikely to do any of them. That’s why it’s best to communicate only one action on a single sub-page – contact us, register, book a consultation, add to basket, and so on.

Speed and responsiveness

Sites that load in one second have an average conversion rate of up to 39%. Conversely, sites that take 6 seconds to load have an average conversion rate of just 18%. That’s according to Portent’s statistics. More words are probably unnecessary.

Designers often go crazy when designing a site, but somehow forget that what they create will ultimately slow down the site’s loading speed. That’s why it’s important to work closely with web developers to find compromise solutions that meet all the design requirements, but can also be optimised to load as fast as possible.

Last but not least, the design needs to be optimised for all the most common device types. Today, it is particularly important to consider mobile devices, as these are the devices from which the majority of visitors come. Before you launch your website and start your advertising campaigns, make sure that it displays correctly in every browser and on devices with the most common operating systems and resolutions, including 4K.