Is your website an unseen drain on your advertising budget without yielding substantial results?
Are you ready to turn things around?
In this comprehensive guide regarding web design fixes, we’ll identify common design and SEO mistakes that could be costing you more than you realize and provide straightforward solutions to fix them.
Common reasons your website might be under performing include repetitive SEO issues, poor design and layout, unresponsive design, and the absence of a secure SSL certificate.
Let’s break these down and explore how to address each one effectively.
Improving Web Design and Layout for Better SEO
Below is a screenshot of a website that illustrates several design flaws:
Notice the wasted space in the header and the poorly laid out navigation bar.
The large white gap below the navigation bar is a typical example of inefficient use of space.
Viewers should have a clear understanding of what your site offers upon it loading on their device, before needing to scroll.
This area is known as ‘above the fold,’ a term borrowed from newspaper publishing where the most valuable content is placed on the front page above the fold of the paper.
Creating Efficient Website Designs for Enhanced User Experience
Minimizing wasted space is crucial.
If redesigning your website feels daunting, consider hiring a professional.
Alternatively, if you prefer a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach, learning proper web design principles is essential.
As for your navigation or menu bar, simplifying your labels is a recommended step in addressing a website’s navigation bar.
Making Your Website Device-Friendly: Essential Tips for Responsive Design
Another example of poor design is shown in the next screenshot:
This site lacks a navigation bar, fails to use a responsive design, makes it unclear who owns the site and it is difficult to navigate.
We’ve tackled the need for a proper navigation bar in the previous step above.
So, now let’s move on to why a website needs to use responsive design.
Why Responsive Design is Crucial for SEO and Mobile Users
Responsive design allows your website to adjust seamlessly to various devices and screen sizes, ensuring it displays correctly and provides an optimal viewing experience.
Transitioning to a CMS (content management system) like WordPress can simplify this process, allowing you to focus more on content and less on technicalities.
Briefing…
Now, why am I offering these examples and sharing them with you here?
Well apparently, these two business owners could not understand why they are not a good fit for media marketing campaigns.
Wasting money needlessly is NOT what Parr’s Publishing is about.
First, you need to have a well-designed website that is easy for ALL devices to visit and browsers to load quickly… as well as making it safe for devices and easy for visitors to maneuver around the site.
Then your next step is to add lots of helpful and up-to-date content ON your website in order to benefit from the content strategies that we use in our media marketing campaigns.
Creating a site with low quality content and then spending money needlessly on having off-site content created and shared online would be like putting the cart before the horse.
Oh… and don’t forget that you also need a SSL certificate in order to protect your visitor’s devices.
Don’t let your website cause a prompt like the one displayed in the screenshot below.
You can do that by making sure that your SSL certificate is securing your entire website no matter which browser your visitors use when viewing your site, by having your site tested.
To test your website, you can use the free online tool called WhyNoPadlock?.
Understanding WhyNoPadlock?… Ensuring Your Site’s Security
Once this site tests and passes your site as being 100% safe, you’ll know that your certificate will work in ALL browsers.
Your next step would be to make sure your site passes the speed test on both mobile and desktop devices.
The best free online tool that you can use to test your site for loading speed is called PageSpeed Insights.
Optimizing Website Speed with PageSpeed Insights: A Guide to Improving Performance Scores
You need not take only my word for the importance of reducing your sites loading time.
Read what Mark Williams-Cook has to say about it below, in his post that appeared on LinkedIn.
So, if your site is:
- too slow to load in a browser,
- is poorly designed,
- has no SSL certificate or the certificate is not functioning properly in all browsers, and
- has little to no relevant or outdated content on it,
…then that is where you should be spending your hard-earned money FIRST, when it comes to improving your online business.
By implementing these important web design fixes before you spend any more money on marketing of ANY sort, you will be better able to stop the waste and boost your site SEO …and save money ta’boot!
Plus… these fixes will provide you with the basic means to increase your website’s organic ranking in SERPs (search engine result pages).
Keeping Your Content Updated for Maximum Impact
Before you dive into new web design improvements, it’s essential to review and refresh your existing content.
With Google’s latest Helpful Content Updates, maintaining up-to-date, valuable content is more crucial than ever before.
Ensure your older posts and page content are relevant, helpful, and engaging to both your audience and search engines.
For a comprehensive understanding of Google’s new standards and how to adapt your content strategy, check out our Guide to Google’s HCUs.
Here is Google’s very own Search Quality Rater Guidelines: An Overview report in PDF format that you can download and keep to refer to at your perusal.
If you’re stumped as to where to begin and you would like to hire a website designer, want your website audited free of charge, or simply want to ask me a question, please feel free to contact me for help.
For those of you who simply want to contribute to the discussion here or want to ask a simple question (or two) right here, please feel free to leave your question(s) in a comment below.
