How to Grow Your Online Business With Good Website Design

Your website is a key part of your brand. Think about how you feel when you visit a well-organized, visually appealing site versus a cluttered, confusing one. The difference is clear: a well-designed website can build trust and keep visitors returning.

Ready to turn your website into a powerful business asset? Here are some essential strategies on how to grow your online business with good website design!

1. Choose your domain name carefully

Choosing the right domain name is the first step in establishing your online presence. Spend time brainstorming and researching to find the perfect domain name that represents your business well.

Keep it short and simple: A shorter domain name is easier to remember and type, ensuring users can find your site quickly. Use a unique name that won't be confused with other brands.
Avoid unusual names: While uniqueness is important, avoid complicated spelling, slang, or made-up words. Steer clear of special characters like hyphens and numbers, as these make a domain name harder to remember.
Think about the future: A trendy word may seem fitting now, but trends and slang change quickly. It's also important to think about the future of your business. You don't want to pick a domain name that will limit what your product offering is. Keep the name broad enough to give yourself space for future growth.
Use the correct extension: Your domain extension impacts how users perceive your brand. Common extensions like .com, .net, and .co are versatile, but ensure the extension aligns with your brand's purpose. Avoid mismatched extensions like .edu for a retail site.
Make sure it's available: Before settling on a domain name, check its availability. Ensure your brand name isn't already trademarked to avoid legal issues.

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2. Design a Website That Captivates and Retains Visitors and Customers

Whether it's shopping, entertainment, or health appointments, everything is accessible through a screen with an internet connection.
To create a website experience that your customers will remember, focus on these elements:

Make your logo visible on every page: Consistent header design is key. Place your brand's logo in the header, ensuring it's always at the top of every page without distraction. Typically, logos are positioned on the top left-hand side of the page next to the menu.
Incorporate your brand's colors across your website: Establish a color palette that reflects your brand and stick to those colors for CTAs, hyperlinks, hero banners, and other design elements.
Use images that reflect your brand's values and voice: Whether using real-life pictures or stock photos, ensure they highlight your brand's values and overall tone. For example, a law office might use serious images of people at work, while a makeup brand for young adults might use vibrant, dynamic images.
Keep your graphics consistent: Any graphics included in your website design should match in style. Consistency in art style gives your website a polished and cohesive look.
Develop a consistent brand voice in all your copy: Before writing any copy, decide what tone aligns with your brand—whether serious and academic or fun and whimsical. Maintain this tone across your website, social channels, and printed materials like packaging.
Create an 'About Us' page: Share your brand's mission, vision, and values with your customers. When your values resonate with them, they're more likely to return to your website, make purchases, and recommend you to their friends. Ensure you follow through on your values so they aren't just hollow selling points.

3. Select a reputable eCommerce platform

When researching eCommerce platforms, consider popular options like Shopify, WooCommerce (which integrates with WordPress), BigCommerce, and Magento. Each platform has its strengths and caters to different types of businesses, so explore their features and capabilities to find the best fit for your needs:

Your needs and wants: List the absolute necessities for your website, such as different currency options for international shoppers or easy integration with other platforms.
Your budget: eCommerce platforms vary in cost, often offering pricing plans based on the size of your operation. Establish a budget and seek platforms that help you achieve your goals without exceeding your financial limits.
Your skills and limitations: Some eCommerce platforms require minimal design and coding knowledge, while others demand more expertise. If you're experienced in coding, this won't be an issue, but beginners might face frustration. Be realistic about your abilities to avoid unnecessary struggles.
Plugins you may need: One advantage of eCommerce platforms is the availability of numerous plugins for various aspects of your operation. Ensure the platforms you're considering have the plugins to execute your requirements effectively.

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While all eCommerce platforms have a learning curve, don't be discouraged. With practice, tutorials, and possibly some assistance from customer support, you can build and customize your website to fit your vision.

4. Focus on your website's user experience

User experience, often abbreviated as UX, provides users with exactly what they need in the most seamless way possible. To achieve this, you must deeply understand your target audience – their preferences, abilities, and potential challenges.

3 steps to achieving good UX

Step 1: Create user personas

Gather data: Start by collecting data about your users through surveys, interviews, and analytics. Look for information on demographics, behaviors, goals, and pain points.
Develop profiles: Use the data to create detailed profiles of your typical users. These profiles, or personas, should include specific characteristics like age, occupation, preferences, and challenges.
Document personas: Write detailed descriptions of each persona, ensuring they are comprehensive and realistic. Include their motivations and the problems they seek to solve with your product or service.

Step 2: Map out user journeys

Identify touchpoints: Determine the key points of interaction that each persona will have with your website - landing pages, product pages, contact forms, etc.
Define user goals: Clearly outline what each persona aims to achieve on your site, whether purchasing, finding information, or contacting support.
Chart the path: Create a visual representation of each persona's steps to reaching their goals.
Identify obstacles: Look for any potential issues or friction points that could hinder the user from achieving their goals. Consider things like complex navigation, slow load times, or confusing layouts.

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Step 3: Apply insights to design

Address pain points: Use the information from your personas and journey maps to address and eliminate obstacles. Make design changes that enhance the user experience by simplifying processes and removing barriers.
Design for personas: Tailor your design elements to meet the needs and preferences of your personas. For instance, if one persona values quick navigation, ensure your website is intuitive and easy to navigate.
Iterate and test: Continuously test your design with real users who fit your personas. Gather feedback and make iterative improvements to refine the user experience.

Key factors for a great user experience

Breaking down UX design into key factors further refines your approach:

Navigation: Keep it simple and logical to guide users seamlessly through your site.
Visual design: Create a welcoming, uncluttered interface with clean visuals and typography.
Site speed: Prioritize fast loading times to prevent user frustration.
Meeting user needs: Ensure your design aligns with user expectations and goals.

In addition to these core components, attention to detail is vital:

Menus: Design a consistent, easy-to-navigate menu structure.
Call-to-action buttons: Keep them clear and concise to drive user engagement.
Cart: Simplify the checkout process for hassle-free shopping.
Forms: Minimize fields to streamline user interaction.
Site content: Provide accurate, trustworthy information to build credibility.
Safety and reliability: Make your site's safety features clear. Use up-to-date SSL certificates, display real customer reviews, and provide easily accessible customer service.
Mobile-friendly design: Given the high percentage of mobile traffic, prioritize mobile-friendly design to enhance user experience across devices.

Additionally, accessibility testing ensures that your website is easy for everyone to use, no matter their abilities. Here's why it matters and how Global App Testing can help:

Welcome everyone: Accessibility testing ensures that everyone, including people with disabilities, can use your website easily.
Stay compliant: Laws about web accessibility are growing. Global App Testing helps you follow these rules without stress.
Better experience: Making your website accessible isn't just about following rules; it's about improving it for everyone. Global App Testing finds ways to improve your site's usability.
Reach more people: An accessible website attracts more visitors from different backgrounds.
Boost your business: Accessible sites make customers happier and improve your reputation.

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At Global App Testing, we provide three essential types of results to enhance your user experience:

Functional bug reports: Get detailed bug reports with videos and environment specifics (OS, version, location, browser) to understand and fix issues effectively.
Usability and UX reports: Conduct usability testing to ensure local users can navigate your product successfully and get actionable insights to improve overall user experience.
Test Case Pass/Fail overview: Receive precise pass/fail results for predefined test cases, offering an instant snapshot of your product's performance and highlighting areas needing attention.

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5. Provide exceptional customer service that’s easy to find

Customers will still need to contact you even if you get the UX right. They may have questions about products, need help with a service, or want to provide valuable feedback.

Start by creating an FAQ page to address common questions, but don't stop there. Ensure your customer support email or phone number is easy to find, whether in your site's menu or footer. It's frustrating for users to have unanswered questions and no clear support options. Consider including a chatbot on your website for quick, accessible assistance. Chatbots can swiftly connect users to support personnel, enhancing their experience.

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Always respond promptly and graciously to customer inquiries and comments. Providing excellent service helps retain potential customers and strengthens your brand's reputation, which is crucial for long-term success.

6. Optimize your website using up-to-date SEO strategies

Optimizing your website for search engines is crucial to bringing in organic traffic.
Some aspects of SEO are easy to handle on your own and get easier with practice. Others are more technical and will require help from someone with more experience.

On-page SEO

While search engines look at your entire website, what ranks are the individual pages. On-page SEO involves adjusting these individual pages to ensure they're search engine friendly and easy for your customers to navigate. Some aspects of on-page SEO include:

Friendly URLs: Your website's URLs should all be clean and descriptive. Avoid URLs that are too long, include symbols, and aren't clear about what the page contains.
Page titles: Your page titles will appear in search results, so work on making them appealing. Avoid making them too long, as they will be cut off. Include relevant keywords in your titles naturally, make them descriptive, and be sure they're relevant to your content.
Headings: Every page should only have one H1. Use H2s, H3s, and H4s to give your content an easy-to-follow hierarchy and structure. These subheadings will make your content easier for search engines and humans to read. Avoid using certain headings just because of how they look, and stick to a hierarchy that makes logical sense.
Optimize images: Images and videos are great visual elements for your website. Try to include keywords in the image name and always give them alt text. If needed, resize your images and compress them so that they don't slow down your website's loading time.

Content SEO

To achieve great content that ranks higher, use these tips:

Conduct keyword research: Before writing a piece of content, you want to ensure it's something people are looking for. You can use tools like Google's Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or Semrush to see the search volume for terms you're interested in writing about. Once you've found a term with a good search volume, plan some content around it. Include the keyword in your headings, text, and image alt text for a better chance of ranking.
Write longer posts: Your posts should be long enough to thoroughly cover the subject you're writing about. Pages that provide ample information and are actually useful to searchers will rank higher.
Include structured data: Rich snippets or structured data may not sound familiar, but you've probably seen them in action. These pieces of information can show up with a search engine result and add more visual information. These can be displayed in many forms, including rating stars, FAQs, how-to steps, product images, videos, etc.

Technical SEO

As its name states, technical SEO deals with more technical aspects of your website that can help it rank higher in SERPs. If you don't have experience with these technical aspects, hiring someone to care for them is a good idea. Some basic tasks to take into consideration are:

Optimizing your website's robots.txt file: This will allow you to tell search engines which pages to crawl and which to ignore. This is most important for websites with many pages since an overwhelming number of pages can negatively affect your site's ranking.
Submit your sitemap to search engines: Remember to submit your website to Google and Bing, the biggest search engines around. This will let them know your website exists and ensure it gets crawled.
Get your site structure right: Your site's structure is important for UX and SEO reasons. It should make sense and be logical so that search engines can easily crawl and understand your website.

Since things can change quickly, stay updated on the latest Google algorithm updates so that your website doesn't fall behind.

Conclusion

Let's recap how to grow your online business with good website design. Avoid rushing your website design, even with smaller details you think aren't that important. Ultimately, all of these details will add up, and you'll be happy you took the time to get them just right.

Test everything along the way, whether it's a slight change in navigation or a revamp of your copy. Document these changes, the testing process, and the results for future reference.
This can all feel like a lot, but you'll be happy you did it all once your website is up and running.

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