If you’re a member of a small business, chances are that you have seen your company’s website. When you visit the landing page, what do you notice? Is contact information easy to find? Is the page’s footer as organized as the header is? Are color schemes, fonts, and logos used and places consistently from page to page, or are they all over the place? On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate your site’s user experience? Do you think your target audience is aware of your company’s online presence?

These are all important questions to consider, and they can be answered by use website design best practices to optimize your site for a straightforward user experience that generates lots of leads for your company. Current website best practices include:

Limiting Text and Maximizing Image Use

Too much text on a webpage can make users feel overwhelmed, and it can complicate the process of finding the information that they are looking for. Outside of blog posts, your web design should feature the minimum amount of text that you need to make your point. Instead of using large amounts of text on your homepage and landing pages, use straightforward phrases to make your points and feature images to illustrate them.

Using images on your homepage and landing page will minimize your need for text because an image can completely replace a product description on these pages. You can feature an image of one of your business’s services or products and then use a simple phrase to grab the customer’s attention. So if you’re a managed IT services company, like us, you can use a stock photo of people interacting with a computer and put a phrase like “All Your IT Needs Under One Roof” beneath it. This gives prospects an idea of what your company does and puts it into simple terms.

Optimizing for SEO

Using your website development and design to maximize your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) will improve its traffic. You can use software like SEMrush to look for keywords similar to the keywords you want to rank for, which will improve your web pages’ rankings in organic searches. Organic searches are searches that users start to answer a question or find a service or product. Typing “IT services near me” in to Google is an example of an organic search. 51% of all website traffic starts with organic searches, and over 40% of revenue is captured via organic web traffic. This is why you should invest in improving your SEO strategy and content. Your prospects are already looking for you, so let your company be found.

Utilizing Responsive Design

Responsive design is the practice of designing websites to be accessed on any device, from laptops to mobile phones to tablets. Using this design technique allows your sites to reach users across multiple devices and platforms. This is an important best practice to integrate into your digital marketing strategies because more people are accessing websites from their phones rather than from a laptop or desktop. If you bring your content to mobile devices and design your site accordingly, you will expand your target audience and optimize your site for lead generation.

Web Development and Design for the Calgary Area

At Pure IT, we can help you design and develop a website that will capture online traffic to help you grow your business. If you have any questions about our services or if you’d like a consultation, contact us today.