Creating a beautiful website is the first step to gaining new customers and developing an authoritative brand.

The appearance of your website plays a vital role in how the visitor perceives your company. A site that incorporates modern design elements, optimized images, videos and other multimedia is much better at creating conversions than a website that looks like it’s from the early 90s.

The appearance of your website plays a huge role in its success!

This factor also includes incorporating responsive design into your website.

Responsive design is the technique of making your website re-size itself to fit within the browser of any device. So, whether someone’s looking at your site through a cellphone or a 32-inch desktop monitor, they’ll still have a great and easy-to-use experience.

That experience — often called user experience (UX) — is the key component in getting a new customer. When users see you have a sleek and attractive website that is easy to use, it’s even easier to keep them on your site. But a good-looking website is just the beginning. You also need clear navigation.

The navigation of your website lets people find what they want.

Modern web design focuses on a simplified navigation to work on desktops and mobile devices. One of the most popular and effective navigation elements is the breadcrumb. Check out the breadcrumb example shown below:

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It’s called Breadcrumb navigation because it links to every page a person views as they move through your site.

Breadcrumb navigation allows your website’s users to jump back to any page they’ve previously seen. For example, an ecommerce site, someone can go from a product page to a category page with one click.

For sites that profit through lead generation, breadcrumbs get users from information pages to index pages, so they can read and learn more about the same topic.

For example, a service-based website may feature a breadcrumb menu that guides users from general to specific services, like cleaning services and then specific rooms or types of cleaning services such as bathrooms or commercial cleaning. This breadcrumb menu makes it easy for users to go back to the general service and find the service they need.

Breadcrumbs are just the beginning, though. You can also use mega menus that feature big text, links to information centers, and additional links to specific topics.

Once a visitor arrives on your site, it’s crucial that you maintain their attention. If you lose it, your visitor leaves your site, and you’ll miss out on a sale or conversion.
Attention is valuable, it keeps someone focused on your brand, products, and or services. Making a sale and or conversion relies on keeping the user’s attention.

For example, different companies can hold attention in different ways, including:

• Video marketing is especially effective at catching someone’s attention since video is a visually-oriented medium. It empowers you to summarize complex ideas in a matter of minutes instead of forcing visitors to spend an eternity read long pages of text. Video keeps users engaged from start to finish.

• Another excellent way of keeping someone’s attention is using downloadable content. Most downloads can consist of a .zip file full of resources or a text-based PDF packed to the brim with unique information. This content is excellent for engaging with new leads and gathering data such as their email address before they download the materials.

• Infographics present industry-related data with simplified, easy-to-understand visualizations. Even though many new infographics are released every day, you can still earn traffic, grab attention and links for infographics by holding yourself to a higher quality standard than your competitors.

Once you have your visitors’ attention, it’s time to give them a sense of direction on your website.

Showing someone how they can proceed on your page is known as direction — in most cases, this guides the user to scroll down your page. Vertical scrolling is the most common because it’s simple, intuitive and useful.

Desktop users have a mouse or scrollbar to navigate through your page, but mobile visitors use their fingers. That means the side of your mobile pages are easy for someone to tap, hold, and swipe in order to scroll through the content on your website.

This design feature goes back to the concept of responsive design.

Responsive design ensures that all your site visitors get the same great user experience, but how they get it is entirely different. Desktop sites might use mega navigation in the header with lots of drop-down menus and big, eye-catching icons or visuals which is way too much content for a mobile site.

Mobile sites have hamburger menus — a navigation style that makes users tap a button, open a menu, and choose their next page from there. Hamburger menus look like this: ☰

Hamburger menus allow mobile users to easily navigate to any part of your website.

Action is the ultimate goal of gaining any new visitor to your website. Visitors take action when you encourage them! That is why click funnels and calls-to-action (CTAs) at the end of every page on your site are important.

A CTA instructions the visitor, telling them what they should do next to get one step closer to becoming a customer. Studies prove that CTAs extremely increase conversions in every online business model, from lead generation to charitable donations.

Whether your goals are to get someone to make a purchase or contact your business, it’s essential to include CTAs in your website. That’s why we offer our team of copywriters to develop attractive CTAs that support your digital marketing goals, from increasing email subscribers to product purchases.

Whether it is in the form of text links, image links, buttons, form fields, etc. it takes time, revisions, and editing to make a performance-driven website — something we, at Digital Concepts, has perfected to an exact science. With your best interests in mind, our web designers create a website that fulfills these five tenants to make sure you succeed online.