How to Make Your Website Stand Out From Competitors
The digital age has changed the way consumers interact with organizations. As everything we absorb moves to digital formats, the competition for consumer attention grows. Consumers can only absorb so much information and recent studies have shown that now more than ever, users have shorter attention spans. So how do you ensure that people visit and engage with your site? You have a really good website with really good content.
Search engine optimization helps to draw customers to your website, but if what visitors find is generic, uninteresting, or difficult to use, they’re not going to stay long. So, to keep users on your website long enough to make a conversion, you need a website that stands out from the rest. Here are our 10 tips on how to make a stand-out website:
1. Have a clean and modern layout and structure.
Website developers are constantly pushing the box on how they can display and lay out information. It is important to stay up to date with your website design. Choose a layout that works best for the goal you are trying to achieve with your website. It is important to not get too carried away with a complex and extravagant layout that loses accessibility and usability. A good web layout should also be easily updated or changed. It is likely that you will be making updates to your website content regularly. Your layout and design should be able to adapt to new pages, copy, or imagery without skewing the view or requiring hours of new development edits.
2. Choose appropriate and engaging colors.
Color is an important visual communication tool that greatly affects how your brand and website are perceived. It is important to consider the color scheme you want for your website and the effect it will have on your consumers. Science has taught us that colors evoke an emotional response and are strong influencers in our decisions. Your website should follow your brand's colors, so ensure that they both communicate the message and emotional response you want from your audience. Read more about Color Psychology here.
It is important to have an equal balance of dark and light colors. Ensure the colors you choose work with the cohesive design and increase the legibility of your copy and content. One important thing that often gets overlooked is the use of white space. White space is an important component of design. It helps break up information and makes large amounts of content easier for consumers to digest. Don’t forget to utilize and consider the amount of white space on your website during the design process.
Example — Render Construction
3. Choose fonts that express your brand’s tone and personality.
Typography is another component of web design that can easily get overlooked but is very important to how your website is perceived. It is important to think about the font choice you use on your website for copy text, headers, and more. Typography communicates to users your brand’s tone, personality, and aesthetics. Are you choosing big and bold or harsh and colorful or skinny and sleek? Each type of font communicates a different message and tone. It is important during this stage to choose fonts that also add to the user experience and functionality. Your website should have typography that is easy to read and looks good from page to page.
4. Ensure your website has excellent user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design.
UI and UX design can be intimidating if you don’t know what they mean, basically, UI and UX are how consumers interact with your website depending on the layout (buttons, sliders, callouts, etc.) and how they perceive the experience of being on your website.
It is important for brand loyalty and conversions to utilize good UI/UX design. Your website should be easy to navigate, and the user’s experience should be the main factor in design. Think about how when you visit a website if you can’t find what you’re looking for or if the links or buttons aren’t correctly working you won’t stay on the site for long or come back.
Example: Old Town Playhouse
5. Implement animation if you have the resources or use other new design trends.
Animation is one of the hottest web design trends now. If you can implement animation into your website, it will help make sure your website is unforgettable and unique. The key to implementing animation is making sure it is done correctly. Animation can be hard to get right, if it is done poorly, you may have usability problems, slow web-loading speeds, or performance problems.
6. Use a variety of visual components: graphics, videos, and photos.
No one wants to visit a website with only text. Visual components like graphics, videos, and photos help brands more creatively communicate information and are also more enjoyable to view. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” before.
Humans are known to be visual creatures, so to connect with your audience try to find areas of your website that include images, videos, or graphics. Imagery can also be used to break up long sections of text, making your website look less intimidating to viewers. One more reason to utilize imagery on your website is that the Google Search Algorithm is reported to rank pages higher that use visual components.
Example: Pat O’brien
7. Keep your website content fresh.
Fresh content is needed to keep your website ranking high in search results. It is also important for engaging perspective clients. People visit your website to learn more about your organization. Make sure your website has accurate and updated content so that consumers learn who you are and why they need your brand in their life. If someone goes to your website and nothing is updated, they may create a view that your brand is old and outdated or get frustrated engaging with you if the information is no longer accurate.
8. Make your website content unique.
To stand out from competitors you need to have unique content that’s different than what everyone else has. It can be easy to use stock images or basic copy across your site but try to use as much original content as possible. This helps consumers learn ‘who you really are’ and better relate to your brand.
The content of your website is the most important thing, so spend time finding creative ways to express your brand. We suggest choosing a unique tone to write your content in if applicable. This could be using funny phrases or unique word choices. Another great option is to utilize a blog. Blogs are popular SEO tactics because they keep content fresh and can increase search results by offering more answers to consumers’ queries.
9. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
More than ever people are using their phones to search the internet. It is important that your website looks and works just as well on a mobile device as on a desktop computer. Not only are consumers more likely to make a conversion on a mobile-friendly website, but it also improves search engine ranking.
I am sure you have visited a site on a mobile device that wasn’t designed for viewing on that device before. You probably clicked off it right away because the text was too small to read, you couldn’t click on any buttons, and you lost all patience for finding what you were looking for. Websites need to be specifically designed for viewing on a variety of mobile device sizes. Good web developers know how to make websites responsive no matter what viewport a user has.
Example: Northeast Michigan Community Mental Health Authority
10. Leave the website design to the professionals.
To create an impressive website that stands out from competitors, it needs to be created by professionals. Web design is a complex process that requires strong creativity and skill. Our team of experienced creative designers and developers has been creating outstanding websites for almost 20 years. The reason behind our success is our effective design process. To learn more about our website design and development process click here.