Website Design Guide

Professional Web  Design

Have you ever visited a website that just looks a little off or the navigation is hard to figure out?  Those types of things cause a site visitor to lose trust in your company and many times will cause him/her to leave your website.

Your website represents your business on the internet and you need to put your best foot forward in presenting your products or services on the web.  A professional website makes all the difference in converting your web visitors into customers.

What makes a professional website?

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A professional website has the following characteristics.

1. It Inspires Trust – When your website follows the principles of design (looks the way it should) your website visitors gain confidence in your business and your ability to deliver on your products or services. Many website visitors will decide if they want to do business with a company within just a few seconds of visiting the site.
2. It is User Friendly – A professional site makes it easy for the visitors to find the information they are looking for by utilizing a clean design with clear navigational links and avoiding clutter.  Poor navigation and clutter is a good indicator of a do-it-yourself type of website.
3. It is Consistent – The look and feel of a website should be consistent throughout all the pages of the site.  This consistency can be seen with a common header and footer, the font and text styling, design elements, images, videos and site colors.
4. It has a Clear Purpose – Your website's purpose should be crystal clear to your site visitors within a couple of seconds of arriving at your site.  It should also appeal directly to your target audience and address the needs it has.  This will help keep them on your site and convert them to customers.
5. It is Mobile Friendly – Being able to view a website on a mobile device is expected and when you can’t people leave the site almost immediately.  A professional site will reformat to fit mobile devices and provide a great experience just like on the desktop version.

At Noble Webworks we strive to meet those standards with every website we build as we go through our development process.  Our clean designs are the foundation of building great, professional sites.

Web Design & SEO

Not all websites are created equal.  Have you ever visited a website that loaded slowly?  This can happen when a website is built with excessive or poor coding, which is common with many do-it-yourself website creation tools.  Another reason for poor speed performance is that the hosting service being used is slow or of poor quality.

Here at Noble, we develop websites with SEO in mind.  That means we start with lean and clean code on the backend of the website.  And we host our sites on quality servers with fast, redundant connections to the internet.  Then with the use of a few other tricks of the trade we produce a very fast loading website which is very important to the search engines and their ranking formulas.

In addition to that we build our sites with a silo structure for easy indexing for the search engines and for helping us target keyword sets applicable to your business.  Once that structure is built we map it out on a sitemap that is suited for submitting to the search engines.

We recommend using a secure certificate for your website because Google has been encouraging that initiative.  It goes without saying that all the websites we create are responsive (mobile friendly) so that they reformat for mobile devices. This is a critical step for obtaining high rankings.

Lastly our site designs encourage action and engagement.  We include calls to action and can create very engaging content for our customers if desired.  Each of these elements help to play a part in creating a search engine-ready website.

Modern Web Design Elements & Philosophy

Website visitors look for and, in some cases, expect an engaging experience when they arrive at a website.  What are some of those elements that they are looking for?  Here is a short list.

• Video – Video is a great medium to communicate information and ideas in an engaging way.  It can include graphics, video footage, images, music, voice over and text.
• Animations – With the ability to animate almost any element on a page and create smooth movement the possibilities are limitless on how you can arrange your page and surprise your visitors with combination animations.
• Parallax – This is another interest creator that will move elements around on your page based on scrolling or mouse movements.
• Calls to Action – These elements can be in the form of buttons or image links that draw your visitors to contact you, download something or provide you with an email address.
• Slideshows – This is a great way to present a group of photos or create a presentation that a visitor can click through or just click play.
• Pop-ups – The use of pop-ups is a great way to catch your visitors’ attention to ask them to subscribe to something or to offer them a special deal, especially as an exit pop-up.

We adhere to a simple design philosophy in the development of websites that is made up of four elements or rules.  The four elements are contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity.

Contrast
We want to make the most important element(s) on a page have the most contrast so that the visitors’ eyes are drawn to it first. In this case, contrast is used for emphasis.  Another important use of contrast is readability. The text on a page needs to have a comfortable amount of contrast to make it easy for people to read.

Repetition
Using repetition in a design creates consistency and helps to tie all the elements together. Repetition can be applied to a logo or design element, fonts, colors and more.

Alignment
You can align elements horizontally to the left, center or right and vertically on top, middle or bottom. Center alignment is typically considered less sophisticated than right or left alignment.

Proximity
This rule refers to how you group related items together.  Closely related items are placed closer together.  More white space is placed between unrelated items.

By following these simple rules, we are able to create stunning websites that look right and are easy for visitors to use.

Next Steps

We hope that this guide helps your business understand the value of professional web design: what it is, why it’s important, and how to improve your website. We invite you to contact us to share your feedback and experiences.  

We would also be pleased to help if you need web design advice and guidance for your in-house team, or you want to partner with an experienced internet marketing agency that cares as much about your success as you do!