The truth is, digital marketing is a pain to perfect.
The digital marketing landscape changes so fast that professionals in the industry barely have any time to catch their breath before an update springs up from out of nowhere.
This is why it’s important to future-proof your website and align it with your marketing campaign. A website that’s specially designed to assist your advertising efforts is likely to stand the test of a rapidly changing environment.
In building future-proof marketing-centered websites, it’s been long proven that focusing on the visuals and graphics alone is not enough. An effective website is a combination of a flawless design, a seamless user experience (UX), and full functionality of digital assets. To a great extent, a winning product or a well-written blog post is only as good as the website it’s on.
By keeping up with the latest trends and harnessing them to meet consumer expectations, your website becomes one of your biggest tools to attract customer interest and convert it into a sale.
Here are some of today’s buzzing web design trends and ways to integrate them into your branding:
Loading Speed
The adage “no one waits forever” still holds a lot of truth, especially in this digital age. In fact, when it comes to website loading time, no one waits more than three seconds.
According to Google, potential customers abandon ship when a website fails to load after the three-second mark. It goes without saying that slow loading speeds can hurt your marketing and work against your potential to convert.
One way to avoid sabotaging your conversation is to have fast loading times for all users on any device.
As almost all consumers use smart devices, it’s best to design an engaging, mobile-friendly site that your customers can access whenever they want, wherever they are.
Keep your site friendly for users with slower Internet Use tools like Pingdom or Google’s Pagespeed Insights by Google to check your site speed and see how you can improve.
Boosting your site’s speed does not only keep your customers from turning to your competitor; with Google’s new mobile algorithm, you also get prioritized for indexing.
Site Architecture
A cluttered website can prevent prospects from going further than the homepage. Keep your site architecture as simple as possible. Plan out your website’s most important elements, and limit them to three. You should not go any deeper than three tiers for the main categories on the site, and then create subpages to contain any supporting information.
Content
When consumers click on an ad for a product they’re interested in, they are expecting to find relevant information about that product on your website. So it’s important to create quality and straightforward content that answers your customers’ queries point blank.
Whether it’s a guest post or on-page copy, content should be free of basic spelling and grammar problems. Steer clear of huge blocks of texts to make your content easy to read. Your copy should be optimized for SEO and address your audience’s needs.
Videos
While brands have used video for website design and development for years, the rise of video is just getting started. About 65% of people are visual learners, and videos are effective when it comes to storytelling. As your website has only 10 seconds to grab a prospect’s attention, videos are the perfect tools to tell your brand’s story in a way that appeals to their most active senses.
Google Fonts
Google fonts allow you to integrate unique typography in over 135 languages into your website. Using these fonts does more than bring out your brand’s personality; it helps boost your site’s performance and load time. The best part is, they’re a free and open source.
CTA Buttons
As Amazon’s one-click-buy patent expires, more opportunities have opened for marketers looking to implement seamless and convenient shopping experiences. Integrating a “buy” button can help you capture a sale through your website. Because your customers no longer need to navigate a complicated maze before they can place an order, there are greater chances of closing a deal.
Active Chat Sidebars
If you operate in an industry where time is critical when addressing your customer’s needs, live chats and chatbots may work to your brand’s advantage. Placing a chat interface on your website lets customers know that your business is prepared to address their needs at any time of the day. Some of these tools incorporate ongoing communication records, which make it easy for you and your visitors to see a history of the conversation and the representative they last spoke with.
AMP Pages
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), as its name suggests, lets your content load on your users’ device more quickly. AMP pages are rendered especially for mobile experiences, and as more users are now searching for products and services through their mobile devices, these can assist you in gaining more traffic.
Web Content Accessibility
For a long time in the past, websites paid less attention to users with hearing or vision impairments, dexterity issues, and other disabilities. Now is the best time to prioritize your compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in your web development queue. Updating your site with certain elements in the guideline such as alt text will also assist your SEO efforts.
Minimalist Design
The “clean” design concept has recently reached new heights, as many sites have started adopting the idea of minimalism. Apple and MailChimp, for instance, make great examples of minimalist sites with their ample white space, simple fonts, and occasional pops of color. To achieve results, marketers need to balance sleek design and quality content.
Interactive Experiences
Today’s consumers have become more exacting. To maintain a steady stream of discerning visitors into your site, be prepared to usher them, from the moment they land on the website all the way through the buying funnel. Give your consumers an interactive experience to keep them engaged and connected with your brand.
Creating an interactive experience is one way future-proof your website. The more impatient and demanding consumers become, the more website design trends will lean toward personalized connections that create meaningful experiences.
HTML5
Speaking of creating meaningful, interactive experiences, HTML5 is a good way to start. HTML5 has successfully eradicated Flash, plus, it’s powerful enough to play a high-definition video without loading an actual file or make 3D games with extraordinary graphics work on your browser. The result? An incredibly interactive web experience.
An easy way to harness this trend is through creating a simple mobile game to give your users something they can actually engage with.
Up Your Marketing Game through Web Design
Boost your marketing efforts through modern and intuitive web design with help from RefractROI, a trusted digital marketing company based in Denver. We are home to some of the most talented internet marketers who turn industry trends into opportunities for better, stronger solutions. The result of our work is a website that informs, engages, and converts.
On top of web design and development, we also offer search engine optimization, social media management, PPC advertising, among other digital solutions. Our goal is to level the playing field for your small business.
Ready to take your digital marketing game to the next level? Call us at 303-501-1821 today or fill out our form and we’ll reach out to you the soonest time possible.