10 Essential Startup Website Design Tips

If you are a new company and try to kickstart your business, you must keep in mind that in the age of Internet there is no other better solution to make yourself seen and heard than a startup website design. Your company’s website is its ID, the means through which your company communicates with the customers and promotes its values and mission.

An attractive website, with eye-catching visuals and user-friendly navigation experience can increase engagement. But when you are new in the web presence, you are sure to miss significant elements of successful web design.

We compiled a list of tips to help you understand which elements are crucial for a startup website design.

1. Usability

Often, startups concentrate on making their website crowded with attention-grabbing elements and forget its main purpose – to attract prospects and to convert customers. Once you, as a business, understand this aspect, you should focus on making navigation and entire user experience friendly.

2. Unique call-to-action (CTA) button

CTA is always the best element to boost conversion. Therefore, the button must be designed to entice and to encourage the user to perform the action. A good CTA button for converting startup website design must be accompanied by a suitable message that clearly explains what the user must do, and bold, eye-catching color.

3. Opt for simple, fresh, and unique website design

When deciding on creating a website for startup, avoid obsolete template that has been used across numerous sites. Users are attracted to novelty that will contribute to making a unique impression about your way of communicating to them. What is even most important is the design of the homepage. The website homepage is usually the place where most first-time visitors will land when accessing your site. Therefore, ensure that the homepage speaks for your business and associates with its style and identity.

4. Good content makes the difference

Search engines like good quality content and rank the sites according to such index. People also like content and this tool can make them spend more time on the site and even return for fresh piece of information. Do a content audit once in a while and make sure it's always updated and in trend with market demands to get more traffic.

5. Make your startup website design responsive

In this mobile era, it is imperative to ensure equal accessibility to all device users. Responsive design is the best choice as it allows you to provide optimal viewing and interaction user experience.

6. Pay attention to load time

Mobile users expect to get equal load time, as desktop users do. According to KissMetrics research every second of page load time costs your website conversion. Users have no patience to wait too long for a page to load and abandon it just after 2-3 seconds.

7. Show your products and services

If you are selling products or are providing services, present them on your homepage in an organized website design manner. Clean images and concise description of the product and the service will win prospective customers over.

8. Choose a trustworthy platform 

Use a reliable platform for you small business website design. Thousands of user reviews that are available online can be of tremendous help. Make your research and decide what platform and features it offers suits your site purpose best.

9. Add links to social pages

Links to social pages included on your company’s homepage give the users the option to check you out and see what you have to say to and share with your followers on most popular social pages.

10. Testing is capital

Ask as many people as possible to test the website design before making it live. Your employees, family members and friends can point out problems that you’ve overlooked and that can be fixed, to ensure the best experience. Even after your website goes live, keep on testing and improving.

Conclusion

These are the tips and trends that can help you come up with a great startup website design and enhance outstanding user experience. Keep them in mind and do your homework on new and current website design trends to always be one step ahead of your competition.

Can you suggest other tips for designing startup websites? We would like to hear them from you in the comments section below.

Responsive Website Design: 6 Lessons To Learn From Your Competitors

It is already a known fact that people tend to brows internet from their mobile devices more than ever. It is thought that by 2017 there will be more than 5 billion mobile users. So, how do we make their browsing experience enjoyable?

This is where responsive website design comes up. Imagine you have a solution for all types of screen sizes and you no longer need to develop a separate mobile website to adjust it for these users.

But it is important to ensure your webpage loads and reformats itself for any specific device, be it a tablet, mobile phone or desktop.

Here is a list of tips you could learn from your competition related to designing responsive websites:

1. User experience

Responsive sites can be accessed from any screen size. Thus, when a user shares the link to your website with other user, the other user will easily access it and open it on a tablet or laptop. Since your website performs well on different platforms, users will be keener to share it with their friends.

2. Loading time

Responsiveness ensures fast loading time for your website. So you will be able to keep users engaged in your content, avoiding their possibility to access another webpage.

3. SEO-boosting

Probably one of the biggest tips that can be shared is that Google favors mobile-friendly websites. The most popular search engine prefers responsive designs and ranks it at the top of its search results. Google even offers free testing tool to analyze your pages, and receive suggestions on how to improve the mobile responsiveness of your website. Therefore, if you are a small business you definitely need to consider this option.

4. Time saving

Responsive web pages are time saving. You no longer need to develop a stand-alone mobile website, but rather configure the existing one to perform excellently on all devices. You can spend this time creating new products and services that will increase your reachability. It also saves management costs. It is cheaper to manage and maintain a single site, with less content.

5. Generate leads

We already mentioned that responsive layouts boosts SEO. Enhanced SEO generates more traffic which converts leads into users.

6. Long-term relevance

Investing in responsive design is, in the long run, a smart decision. Internet traffic coming from mobile devices is constantly increasing. So you want to make sure that your website is optimized to perform well on all devices, even those that haven’t appeared yet.

Related Post: The Advantages of Responsive Web Design

Conclusion

Responsive website design allows you to be ahead of all trends and gain and attract more traffic that ultimately converts into users. If users are happy with the way the content of your site displays on their mobile devices they will eagerly and smoothly migrate from one page to another, enjoying the same user experience provided by traditional sites.

What other tips one can learn from competition in matter of responsive design? Make your thoughts heard in the comments section below.

5 Mobile App Design Trends of 2016 You Need To Know

Mobile devices are invading our life and their enormous popularity has challenged apps designers to come up with attractive and exquisite ideas for the consumers. They have to keep up with the ever-changing design trends so that their final products be enjoyable and not obsolete.

Here are 5 mobile app design trends of 2016 that you should consider when laying another app for mobile devices on the consumption table.

Gestures

Gestures are those tapping, flicking, dragging, pressing, zooming, rotating and other magical tricks that activate the app. They are comfortable for app users and are easy to use on devices of various sizes and shapes. One thing that mobile app designers should keep in mind is that most people tend to hold their smartphones in one hand and deliver these gestures with their thumb. Therefore, they must take into account the space they need to work with to make the app and gesture sync.

Pastel colors

Pastel hues are making their way into the mobile app trends. What makes this trend a good one is that the pastel-colored background allows for the application’s important features stand out and not take the user’s attention away from them.

Typography

Typography is the backbone of mobile app design. It is known that our main means of communication is through text. Therefore, the proper use of typography is essential in improving UX. Text must stand out on the app’s interface and black text on a white background is the best choice in matter of readability for app users.

Animation

Previous mobile applications were more static than they are today. With continuous development of smartphones and their more powerful capacity to support heavy-animated applications, designers are using this opportunity to make the application design more dynamic. Animation is also the element that improves the user’s visual experience.

Playful

The above trends relate to the more technical part of the mobile app design. One thing that makes users come back to your application after their first encounter is the degree they have enjoyed the application. Playfulness of an application is the key for your app design to engage users in the interactive aspect of the application experience. This trend gives mobile designers green light to their imagination and creativity.

Related: Popular Web Design Trends for 2016

Conclusion

If you want your apps design to be distinguishable and catchy don’t neglect these design trends. Whenever you are designing a mobile application you should always think about the user experience and user interaction with the product that you will make available for their consumption. Therefore, in order to be able to gain as many users as you can, your mobile app design must be unique, but at the same time in line with the users’ expectations.