Typography and graphic design have been around for far, far longer than the World Wide Web, and the principles that applied decades ago still apply today, although there are some challenges that are unique to the scenario of displaying interactive content on a computer screen.
If you want your website to reach as many users as possible and to convert well, then you need to ensure that it doesn’t just look good – it must be easy to use too. This is particularly challenging when you consider the sheer number of different devices that visitors may be using when they access your website. Mobile web traffic exceeded desktop web traffic for the first time just over a year ago, and there are so many different screen sizes and different browsers that designers must take into account.
Intuitive and Responsive
A good website design needs to be responsive so that it can cater to all those different platforms, and it also needs to be easy for both search robots and people to navigate. Visibility to the search engines and to your users is a huge challenge for webmasters, but it is one that any good professional design company will take into account from an early stage of the design process. The humble alt tag, for example, has evolved from being a tool for accessibility and for the benefit of low-bandwidth users to being a tool that is useful for improving SEO.
Semantic metadata is also proving useful for increasing the visibility of websites and making them stand out when they appear in the SERPs. Things such as review ratings, photos and a presence on the maps sections of the most popular search engines are all useful if you want to reach local users.
Speaking to the User
Another challenge is that of geographic targeting. While we love to remind people that the world is a small place, the fact is that local communities do still have their own colloquialisms, their own important events and a sense of community that marketers can and should play upon when trying to reach users. It makes sense for a company that is based in Newport to work with a local marketing and web design company in Newport rather than one from the other side of the country. For example Newport web design Netcentrics, will be in a good position to perform high-quality local SEO, simply because of their local knowledge.
The more you know about your prospective users, the easier it is to give them what they want and to create a website that speaks clearly to them. Remember that you are not trying to sell to yourself. As a business owner, you know more about your business than the average consumer would, and you would be looking for different things in your company. Take some time to see things from the customers’ perspective, and show them the things that they want to see.
