Keep your visitors on your website for as long as possible

Web design, where do we start?

At first, many many MANY moons ago, my early website designs were all non responsive html and CSS builds. They looked the same on a mobile phone as they did on a desktop, that is to say there was no automatic resizing; as oppose to most well designed websites today. Having a mobile responsive website, page load speeds and good content are all good things not only Google looks for when ranking your website – you should be thinking about also, as it’s your audience that gets to know about you, through your online store or business.

Why I love WordPress and how I use it for Web Design

I stumbled across WordPress while I was coding a website from scratch, when someone looking over my shoulder said “Why don’t you just do it in WordPress?”. I was aware of WordPress but never really looked into how it could help me, I always thought it was specified for bloggers. Then this person showed me themeforest.net and my eyes opened wide – to the sheer abundance of design templates. This lovely person who was a friendly bubbly lady from New Zealand in one of my old job roles as a do it all IT department, also showed me how to use and install WordPress from scratch. I started to dabble with templates, changing colours, images, text, fonts, pages, menu bars and pretty much anything the templates let me play with. Although templates are great as they’re fully screen responsive out of the box and will look great on both desktop to mobile devices, as well as thousands being available – I found that once you start to strip away the unwanted content, sections, pages, etc. the finished article never felt quite right in comparison to the default template. I needed something that offered me more control with regards to web design.

Using Divi page builder for bespoke Web Design

The templates were working fine for me, I was able to provide my clients with a fully working website, mobile responsive and with a Content Management System (CMS) that WordPress provides; this allows you as the client to manage the content of your website after it’s gone LIVE.

Most of the templates I used, had by default Visual Composer installed, but I wanted more. I wanted something that would suit my way of thinking, easy to use and more importantly, easy to show how my clients to use as ultimately it will be them managing their own website.

I searched high and low and tested quite a few page builders, but the Divi theme and Divi page builder were by far the best in my opinion that offered what I needed. Easy to use, easy to demo, tons of YouTube tutorial videos and amazing FREE support. There was and is no other choice for me, when the it comes to page building in WordPress, the Divi page builder allows me to design bespoke responsive web pages. All of the websites in my portfolio are built using the Divi page builder.

Getting the elements right to help with SEO on your website

There are several things to consider with good web design that can impact on your SEO:

• Desktop to mobile screen responsiveness – automatically resizing your website to fit nicely on a mobile device screen – Google likes this
• Good, engaging and interesting content
• Bit of interaction helps, buttons, call to actions, videos, etc.
• Page load speeds
• Easy to use navigation and menu bars

Google now uses screen responsiveness as a measure for ranking your site in search results. So making your website look and feel great in desktop view, all the way down to mobile screen, helps with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Your content needs to be attention grabbing, as our attention spans get smaller and smaller these days, people visiting your site for just a few seconds and moving on is not ideal. You want and need them to stay on your site for as long as possible and from a business point of view, you want them to eventually contact you. With more people searching for their needs as well as local business needs looking for customers in specified areas, SEO can help get you the right audience.

Text content – the more the merrier – or is it? Whenever I advise my clients about providing content, I say quality over quantity. I’m not going to start to try to understand Google algorithms but the good old days or sticking in generic keywords in paragraphs of text has moved on, people react to interesting and realistic content these days. Planning your content and targeting your audience needs to be thought out and discussed beforehand.

People also like to click and interact with your website, buttons, call to actions and forms to fill out. Even LIVE CHAT. They’re all engaging tools that catch your visitor’s eyes when they land on your website.

Although not technically impacting SEO, making your website easy to navigate with clear menu’s and headings all adds to keeping your site visitors on your website for longer. When designing, it’s humans that visit your website and it’s those humans that will eventually contact you and hopefully lead to a sale, it’s those humans we must appeal to with human design, human content and easy navigation for humans. It might sound obvious but when you bring a web design to life the challenge is to implement all the above in a subtle, subliminal, maybe sometimes blatant way.