Top 5 Web Design Guidelines in 2016

It’s tough to stay current in an ever changing field of website design as well as designing websites with SEO in mind. Whether you’re building websites for your own empire of websites or if you’re working for clients, here are 5 guidelines that you should keep in mind this year.

Top 5 Guidelines for Website Design in 2016

This is not a comprehensive guide on web design, but this is something that will point out very important areas that you need to focus on. There’s always web design experts out there wanting to share in depth tips and advice but the truth is many web designers are not experts when it comes to converting traffic into leads and leads into customers.

There are design concepts that are award worthy, but do you care about awards or do you care about profitability?

#1 – Responsive Design Is Better Than Just Mobile Compatible

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

Obviously with the growing numbers in mobile users whether it is by smart phone or tablet, you need to be able to adapt your website for those users. This is the reason why responsive web design is one of the guidelines.

Fortunately for you, most template and theme providers are focusing on responsive templates now for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and any other content management system out there.

There are a lot of product creators out there focusing on mobile compatible sites, or mobile independent websites that have a lot at stake if everyone switches to responsive design. There’s a huge problem for them and they’re doing everything they can to ensure you continue buying from them instead of making a better decision. They come up with lies saying that a mobile site is better than a responsive site for search engine purposes and user experience. Well, we know that is a blatant lie considering Google has said they consider responsive design the standard and is an ideal user experience. In fact, every Google property is now responsive.

Advantages responsive design has over a mobile site include:

• Adjusts based on the screen size of the user
• Instead of rendering via the server, it renders using the user’s device
• One domain works for everything, better for SEO
• Easier link building, link equity is the same instead of double the work load
• Better not just for mobile users but also desktop users

Stay updated every time an awesome piece of content is posted, enter your email below.

#2 – Clear And Easy Way To Contact You

One mistake I see web designers, marketers, SEO companies and tons and tons of client websites is that they don’t have a stupid easy way to contact you. The best designed site in the world, does not help you at all if the visitor doesn’t take the intended action, which is to qualify themselves as an interested lead instead of just someone researching and stumbling across your website.

For client websites, I like to have the phone numbers and call to action through the page, on every page! I literally place the phone number in 4-5 different spots on each page.

Where can you place the phone number?

• In the header. A lot of people place social media icons on the top right side of their header, but I think a phone number works better.
• In the slideshow with images. If you have a slideshow for your client or for yourself, it’s good to have a tagline with your phone number in each of those slidershow images.
• Below the slideshow or header but above the content. CALL NOW (Phone Number) To Find out Why We’re The Best SEO Company In NYC.
• Inside the content or at the end of the content with a call to action.
• In the footer.. sometimes people scroll all the way down and you want them to be able to see your number wherever they are on the page.

Besides having a “Contact Us” page in the top menu, sidebar/footer menu, I like to create an image that says CLICK HERE for a FREE Estimate that links to a form, it can be the contact form or a more defined estimate form that you link to. This creates another point of contact if they aren’t able to give you a call.

Another tip about the phone number… you can have a click to call number in the content or wherever you want so if they’re on a mobile device it makes it super easy to contact you.

While this isn’t exactly about “design” it is an important aspect of designing your website or client websites to allow for maximum conversions which is the point of having a website anyway, isn’t it?

#3 Create Some Sort of Lead Magnet and List Building Capability.

I know some of you are thinking that if you have a client who is a plumber and someone visits the website they probably have some sort of problem that needs immediate attention. It’s a huge mistake to believe that everyone that visits is going to want something done immediately so you don’t bother with any kind of authority building.

I can tell  you that is a humungous mistake. Perhaps if your client is a locksmith or tow company, I get your point. However in many industries you can definitely increase conversions for your client by creating some sort of lead magnet.

For example, let’s say it IS a plumber website you’re working on. You can create a lead magnet like one of these:

• CAUTION: Don’t Hire a Plumber Until You Read This Guide
• 7 Tips To Hire a Plumber without BREAKING THE LAW!
• Ultimate Guide To Finding the RIGHT Plumber for the Job

If you’re not doing it for clients, you should at the very least be doing it for yourself. You can set up file delivery with your autoresponder and create nice looking opt in boxes if you’re using wordpress with Magic Action Box Pro which is what I use for this blog.

The reason you do this isn’t just to build an email list and contact list of interested people, but to develop authority in an industry that is filled with competition. Definitely a necessary inclusion into this guideline list!

#4 Skip The Damn Flash Animations

Flash was pretty popular back in 2004-2008 and I still see a lot of flash, more flash than I ever really care to see. In fact, 2 years ago a print company in New York contacted me for a quote on a redesign and they had a budget of $35,000.

One bad thing though…

The enter website would be completed using Flash.

I didn’t win the contract, thank goodness. I did what I could to warn them that they should steer clear of that much animation, that people aren’t going to like the usability and it’s going to alienate mobile users but they didn’t care, they just liked it because it looked good. This company was a pretty large national company that dealt mostly with customers on their website. This company is no longer in business.

In 2000, about 15 years ago, Jakob Nielsen wrote an article about Flash being 99% bad. It’s amazing looking back at that article and seeing the incredible foresight and intuition not just on flash but everything else mentioned about why it was bad, it still holds true today.

Scrolling text, tons of movement, still bad even if it isn’t flash. You don’t want to distract the visitor from taking the intended action you want them to make.

How to have animation or movement without flash?

It’s important to keep in mind that whether it is flash or not, a lot of animation is bad. When used properly it can be a cool addition to a website but not when it’s used too much. Too much can be a very bad thing.

I actually like to use some movement in the form of a slider/slideshow on the home page or using a jquery photo gallery for a portfolio or showcase. The only thing you really have to keep in mind when using those plugins and feature is image size.  I’ve seen a lot of sliders with 5 or 6 images all around 800kb. If you have 6 images at 800kb that’s an additional 4.8MB download, and adds to the page loading time.

#5 Page Speed is an Important Part of Design

A new friend of mine, Luis, was pissed off because he just had his website redesigned by someone and the loading time was 100% higher than the original site. Both sites looked like garbage to me, but that’s beside the point.

Loading time is really an important part of design now, whether we like it or not and I admit, it’s something I have overlooked on many occasions.

Did you know?

• 47% of Consumers Expect a Page to Load in 2 Seconds
• 40% of people abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load?
• A 1 second delay in page response accounts for at least 7% loss in conversions?

I don’t know why those statistics shock me, it makes perfect sense when you think about it. How fast is your website loading? I bet you want to check your speed right now huh?

Here are a few ideas to decrease your loading times.

• W3 Total Cache (WordPress)
• Gzip and Javascript Compression
• Minify javascript and CSS
• Utilize a Content Delivery Network like maxcdn.com
• Optimize images, use Smush.It

Do you have any other ideas regarding page load times? Comment below.

How Do You Like These Guidelines?

I would love to hear your thoughts on these guidelines and what you believe should have been included in this list. Comment below and let me know what you think!