If you thought that having an online presence was enough to help attract customers to your business on the internet, it’s time to think again, as one article for Entrepreneur recently pointed out.

The publication noted that poor web design is likely to result in prospective customers navigating away from your site to one of your competitors who has done a better job of building their online presence.

“Poorly designed websites are the digital equivalent of a brick-and-mortar store with stuck doors, broken windows and leaky pipes dripping puddles on the floor. Cue horrified customers running to your nearest competitor,” the news provider asserted.

Of course, online your nearest competitor is likely just a quick search and a click or two away. So, what elements should you focus on if you want to improve your web design?

Firstly, you need to begin by deciding what you want your customers to do. By refining this down to one action, you can start to design your site with that in mind. You need to make it clear what your business is about and what you want people to do on your website.

The aim is to encourage your visitors to a very clear action. The news provider used the example of Google. Although the organisation offers plenty of services besides search, its home page still directs everyone to do one task: search.

Secondly, you need to ensure that both your site’s design and its content is created to allow for how internet users read. Many people simply scan websites looking for relevant information.

Heat mapping techniques have shown that we do this in an F-shaped pattern, scanning the headlines and first lines of paragraphs before moving down the left hand side to find what we’re looking for.

Breaking your content up into manageable chunks and avoiding that wall of text will do a lot to appeal to your customers.

It’s also important to remember that we are motivated by visual stimuli much more so than written ones. That means your website needs to look inviting and uses photos and images to help show people what your business is all about.

Another statistic that the news provider shared is that as many as 40 per cent of visitors to your site will give up and look elsewhere if your page takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s why it’s so important to work with professionals in website design in Scotland, or wherever you’re based, to make sure that your site is properly optimised.

Failing to do so will not only affect the number of people who stay on your site after discovering you but will also impact where your website ranks in search engine results pages. Slow page load times have a negative impact on your site’s rank.

All of this means that if you have a poorly designed website that isn’t fully optimised, you’ll likely be missing out on customers that don’t find you and losing a good proportion of the ones who do.

Earlier this year, it was suggested suggested that making sure your website fully optimised should be one of your digital resolutions for 2020. Have you made much progress with this or does it keep getting pushed down your to-do list? If it’s the latter, get in touch with 2BCreative to find out how they can help.