Your website is your digital handshake—often the first point of contact with potential customers. With attention spans dwindling and users on the go, your web design must captivate, inform, and guide customers swiftly. Below, we’ve identified five foundational pillars of web design to meet and exceed your customers’ digital expectations.
Your Web Design Is Relevant for Your Industry
New web design projects are set to fail if they fall into this trap: they want the next Ferrari or Apple website for industry X. If you’re starting a new business or are redesigning your existing website, you’ll need to accept that this may not be possible for your industry. Product-centered sites are great for design and product companies but can be confusing for service businesses. For instance, a consulting company with many images and little content will likely not work for customers seeking to understand what the company does. In addition, image-heavy websites with little content often sacrifice SEO, resulting in rankings on SERPs.
From a web design perspective, this direction is acceptable for well-established brands but should be avoided for new businesses. Customers will leave if they have difficulty understanding your core product or services from only your designs. We recommend avoiding being overly visual for non-design industries and incorporating well-written content on your website.
Your Web Design Is an Extension of Your Brand’s Story
Storytelling is a huge component of sales. As you craft the story around your business, your designs must do the same. For example, you may find that your customers respond better to the fear of missing out message than your current one. If so, you must match all the design components with this new message!
As such, your brand’s web designs must be carefully executed to connect with customers quickly. Color palettes must enhance copywriting and call-to-actions, images must portray feelings and on-page actions, and the page layout must flow smoothly from top to bottom and across all pages. Sprinkled across your pages is copywriting that your designs support. Businesses ignoring these sound design principles tend to fall flat on storytelling and how they rank against their competitors on SERPs.
Your Web Design Must Differ from Your Competitors
With increasing competition in every industry, it’s hard to stand out as a business. There are multiple ways to stand out through strategy alone:
- Do you do it through your value proposition?
- Do you differentiate based on your subject matter expertise?
- Or do you do everything under the sun?
Your answer should be yes to all of the above!
In a sea of sameness, supplementing a sound strategy with good web designs is ideal. At the minimum, you must avoid using a cookie-cutter theme for your website. If you’re unfamiliar, cookie-cutter themes are website templates reused repeatedly across multiple businesses with minor design differences. Therefore, time and resources must be allocated to crafting unique web designs; building a custom website is the way to go!
Your Web Design Follows Your Branding Playbook
Once your branding playbook is finalized, you’ll want your web designs to follow it. For those who don’t know, a branding playbook establishes your logo, color palettes, typography, and how all three can be used. Think of the playbook as a way to standardize your brand. Standardizing is essential because consistency trains customers to recognize your brand. In doing so, they’ll familiarize themselves with your logo and style, eventually leading to your brand becoming a part of their consideration set when they purchase.
On a side note, you’ll market and advertise across many mediums beyond the web, such as fliers, signs, websites, brochures, swag, magazines, and at different events. These other mediums must also be branded accordingly. Connect with Uplancer today for help with branding across all mediums.
Your Web Design Invites Action
Every web designer must guide customers to initiate an action. This action may be to continue reading content, call your team, or submit a contact form. For instance, if your goal is for customers to leave their contact details, your designs should emphasize the contact form and not allow it to be lost on the page. So, don’t dump everything on your web page, hoping customers leave their contact details.
Your website actions must be appropriately mapped and proven. Conversion rate optimization, which leverages A/B testing, is perfect for understanding customers’ habits and proving whether your web design decisions are initiating action! Just make sure to integrate Google Analytics for that extra layer of insights into which actions work and don’t work on your website.
The Bottom Line / TLDR
A great website is more than beautiful—it’s functional, strategic, and aligned with your brand. Focus on relevant design, compelling storytelling, differentiation, consistent branding, and conversion-focused layouts. Ready to elevate your web design? Connect with Uplancer to create a site that wows your customers and achieves your business goals.
