The design of your website plays a very crucial role in strengthening the online presence of your brand. More than 70% of internet users prefer to see something that appeals to the eyes, instead of looking at a simple plain design. Having a user-friendly, efficiently-running website, attracts maximum web traffic. This means that the first step, towards achieving success online, would be to ensure that your website is professionally designed.

Let us look at the benefits your business website receives from professional web design: –

Successful Digital Campaigns

An eye-catching website attracts a significantly higher number of prospects and is the starting point of your digital marketing strategy. However, if you are not using proper channels to market your product/service, then it is of no use. Social media, e-commerce platforms, and apps help you reach out to clients across the globe. If you use social media accounts like Instagram and Facebook, you can connect with millions of users and easily market your brand through them.

Shopify, Big Commerce, etc. are some ready-to-use e-commerce platforms that you can use to introduce your business online. If you make use of a mobile or desktop app you can enhance customer experience to a great extent. If you do not have a professional-looking website, you will find yourself unable to strategize your marketing efforts because of a lack of a proper reference point online. So, your first priority should be to get a website that is attractive, informative, and user-friendly, so that you can use it as a reference point for the channels mentioned above to market your brand digitally.

Accessible Website

Just developing a wonderful website, does not mean that you have everything you need. Take steps to ensure that your website loads smoothly on all browsers. Users do not have the patience to wait at a website where images take ages to load. Your top priority is to engage the customer as soon as he lands on your website, thus your website should be accessible on all browsers and must be fast. Hire the right experts to make sure you face no technical issues with the site. Thus it is vital to get a professionally designed website that passes the various tests. When your website functions perfectly at all times and is always available to customers, you will find yourself in a position to close more sales.

These statistics will surprise you,

• 47% of internet users expect a website to load within 2 seconds.
• 64% of the mobile users expect a website to load in 4 seconds.
• You lose 11% page views if the load time of your website is delayed by 1 sec
• Conversions reduce by 7% for each second a website loads late.

Thus, if are making $100,000 daily, then by improving 1% load time, your sales can go up by $7,000 daily.

Not a bad deal at all, isn’t it? To achieve this, you only need to invest to get your website designed professionally.

Reduce in Bouncing Rate

Having a website that is user-friendly, bug-free, virus-free, and easily accessible on laptops, computers, tablets, and smartphones is a boon. Your website is the face of your business and provides your audience with a first impression. Adding interesting content, thoughtful images, and logos, binds your niche audiences and keeps them coming back to your website for more. A professional looking website engages your audience, causing them to stay, thus reducing bounce rate.

Long-Lasting Impression

A badly designed website might get you a customer, but may leave them with a very bad impression of your business. It is important to deliver a great first expression through your website to prevent users from leaving mid-way. A professional web site creates a long-lasting first impression in the minds of your audience. Also, the user interface of a nicely designed website is smooth allowing for easy accessibility to content.

Complies with Latest Trends

Web designing experts keep abreast of the current trends and design new websites accordingly. They know what clients like in terms of format and look of the site. For example, sometimes the user gets frustrated if the website is not able to load images quickly. A professional website developer may include animated logos, scroll-triggered animations, distinctive themes, etc. to add extra punch to your website. When you offer your customers something extra and unique, why would they leave you!

Extended word of mouth

How many times have you enjoyed looking at a website that was excellently designed? It is very likely that you have shared that company name or website with friends and relatives simply because of the impact the website has had on you. Great design combined with an intuitive navigation on the website results in a great experience for the end-user. This word of mouth leads to more traffic and encourages potential customers to visit simply because they know beforehand that the website is well-designed.

Immense Benefits from Responsive Design

Most customers use their smartphones to place orders and to search for products or services online. When your website makes use of a responsive web design, it means that it is compatible with smartphones. Having a responsive web design helps to improve customer experience thus increasing your ROI.

Bottom Line:

The above points illustrate the importance of having a professional web design for your website. It is time-saving, hassle-free, very responsive, and worth the value. Good web design ensures that your leads remain on the page, thus increase conversion rates.

Running a business these days means that you need to engage certain level of professionalism in all areas of the market. In today’s world, where the internet is so easily accessible to all, having a poorly designed website, could be the only reason for losing a lot of potential business. Add a layer of professionalism to your web design with the help of QualDev website development company and realize your business goals in a shorter time frame! 

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Responsive web design provides a handful of benefits for businesses. It helps business owners to reach out to their potential customers all around the world, on a variety of devices. A responsive website, customizes itself to conform to the criteria of a user’s device, regardless of the model, screen size, specifications or settings. A few of the advantages of using responsive design are:

1. Google Loves Responsive Design

Google publicly promotes the use of responsive web design, as it matches with their high standards of quality content and clear link structure. Responsive web design uses a single URL and the same HTML code; allowing Google to track, index and organize content from websites easily. It uses only CSS to manage a webpage that is displayed on a particular device.

In addition, Google recommends using a responsive web design because a single URL makes it easier for users to interact, link, and share content from a website they like. Additionally, users do not need to rely on a redirection to access an optimized view of their site. This decreases the loading time of a website tremendously.

2. More Traffic From Mobile And Tablet Audience

According to statista, nearly 52% of all global web traffic came from mobile devices in the third quarter of 2017. That is more than half of all Internet traffic. Yes, you heard it right! Many predict that this trend will rise to 63.4% in 2019.

Creating a responsive website takes less time than building a separate mobile application in addition to a standard desktop website. Responsive websites are built to tailor their content accordingly to the size of the screen and graphics, they provide you with the best opportunity to reach a large number of potential customers.

In this way, you can increase your consumer exposure and generate more traffic to your website, increasing your brand awareness and revenue as well.

3. Improve User Experience

A responsive website results in a more enjoyable user experience. If your audience finds it hard to navigate or use the site because of poor quality design or irregular content formats, they will abandon your site. Google states that if a user accesses the mobile version of the website and gets frustrated, there is a 61 percent chance that they will redirect themselves to another website.

However, if your website unfolds and reacts to a change in screen size, visitors can access menus, links, buttons, or forms easily. As a result, the user experience your website provides improves and your visitors spend more time on your website.

4. Cost-Effective And Time Saving

Before the introduction of the responsive web design concept, web developers had to create multiple versions of the same site for different devices. That was a difficult task and took significant efforts during not only the development phase but also when updates were required, because of the duplication of tasks to make updates on each version of the website. Earlier, a mobile version required a separate mobile codebase.

With the evolution of latest technologies, the responsive web design concept was born. Today web developers are able to create a single website that adjusts to all screen sizes, has only one version of source codes, and a single CMS to update web pages. This significantly reduces the time and cost of a project.

5. Better Loading Time With Low Bounce Rate

As we all know, many of us use mobile devices for short spans, and carry out in depth research from our pc’s or laptops. Studies find that a mobile visitor leaves a web page that takes more than three seconds to load.

In this case, an optimized and responsive mobile website offers the visitor a much better user experience. As a result, they are more likely to stay longer and explore different sections of your site. If your site is slow and unresponsive, it is much harder to keep the visitor engaged, therefore, increasing the chance of abandonment. A well-optimized page not only loads fasts, it also keeps users engaged, resulting in lower website bounce rate.

6. Enhance SEO

Another great benefit of Responsive Web Design is an improved search engine ranking of a website. Today, with so much competition on the net, responsive web design is as important as search engine optimization is, for delivering high-quality content.

As of April 2015, Google considers the responsiveness of your website as one of the signals that determine your site’s rank on the search engine results page. Google webmaster trends analyst, Pierre Farr, says that Google prefers websites that use responsive design instead of a mobile template for better SEO.

If your site does not respond well when it is viewed on a mobile, the search engine giant will place your website lower on the results page, and vice versa, if your site passes the mobile device test it would rank higher on the results page.

Conclusion:

As you can see, responsive web design is the trend of today’s marketplace. Creating responsive websites has many benefits for your business. With the rise in the use of smartphones, the responsiveness of the website is crucial if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. If you are planning to make your site responsive on all devices, QualDev – an ecommerce website design company has the expertise to help you achieve this goal. You can also check out the best Web Design Tips to Improve User Experience here.

The post This is How Responsive Web Design Helps You And Your Business appeared first on QualDev.

Here are 7 Web Design tips to improve user experience on your website:

1. Make Your Website Design Elegant

As soon as someone clicks on a website, it creates an impression in their mind that they then use to judge whether to continue or leave the website. This decision is based on how the user perceives the design of a website. If the visitor does not find what they see and read appealing, they leave your website, never to return.

Websites should have an elegant homepage that provides easy navigation, fast loading time and consistent color schemes. Make your website user-friendly. Your visitors will be more likely to become paying customers and returning visitors. A website can be made user friendly by 

Responsive design: For a perfect look on all devices, irrespective of whether they are viewed on smartphones or the screen of a desktop. A website should be simple without tiring your reader’s eyes.

Fonts: it is advised to use easy-to-read fonts to provide readers with the value they need.

Eye-catching images: Graphics summarize text and help visitors to process information quickly and easily.

2. Optimize Website Loading Time

A fast loading webpage is key to providing a great customer experience. When a visitor encounters poor web design and extremely low loading speeds, they leave the website instantly because there are just too many other options available to wait around on one.

A study by Stanford shows that 75% of Internet users judge the credibility of a business based solely on the structure and quality of its website. According to an infographic from Kissmetrics, if a website takes 4 seconds or more to load, it has already lost 25% of its visitors.

If loading a site takes more than 4 seconds, especially on a mobile device, it is all over. So, make sure your website loads surprisingly fast. Ideally, a website should load within 3-4 seconds.

3. Optimize Your Website For Mobile Devices

The way people surf the Internet has changed a lot. Over the years, the number of users accessing the Internet on a desktop computer has dropped significantly. A growing number of people access the Internet using their mobile devices. Today, more than 61.2% of users use a mobile device for shopping and surfing the internet. 

When you build your website, make sure to optimize it for mobile users. Otherwise, you will not only lose traffic, but you also lose your business too. The design of your website should be appealing and carried out in a way that ensures it visually matches the size/shape of the screen wherever it appears. The most responsive websites not only adapt to new screen sizes, they are also intuitive and easy to navigate.

4. Create Scannable Content

According to a survey by the Nielsen Norman Group, only 16% of users read articles word by word online, while 79% of users just take a close glance at the content on a page. You can improve your customers experience by making it easier to analyze your content. You can divide the text into shorter paragraphs and use headings, bullets, and lists wherever possible.

When you create a website using WordPress, you can install a visual editor, such as Divi Builder or Thrive that you can then use to format content as they provide customizable panels and function grids.

Avoid using jargon or language that is hard to understand. Your articles should be easy to read and contain everyday vocabulary. Claims must be linked to credible sources that allow users to examine a particular topic if they wishes to.

5. Include A Review And Testimonial Section

People are social beings with emotions. Seeing others sharing their opinion encourages them to share their opinions too. Make sure to add a review and testimonial section while designing your website.

Testimonials and reviews show visitors that they are not alone in the queue, other people have visited the website before them and were happy with the services they received. This gives new customers a boost to their confidence, encouraging them to choose your service. You can also add a section for best-sellers if you have a handful of products. This helps customers make better decisions while choosing their perfect product.

6. Offer Value With Newsletters

E-mail marketing is a great tool that you can use to build a long-lasting relationship with your customers. Use newsletters to offer something valuable to your customers or visitors, such as a discount coupon or access to premium content on your website, not available to the public.

For example, if you are running a GYM, you can offer subscribers free training plans and nutrition tips through your Newsletter. Many online clothing brands, including Nike and Adidas, offer 10-15% off coupons when a new user signs up for their mailing list. To create a credible newsletter you can use popular e-mail marketing services for small and medium businesses such as MailChimp, Drip and Aweber.

7. Improve Your Customer Service

You need to treat your website just like a traditional company and ensure you provide good customer service. Make sure that all your contact information, such as e-mail address and phone numbers are visible on all pages of your website. This will give your customers the opportunity to stay in touch with you if they have questions or problems regarding the product they have purchased. You can also use a live chat tool to get access to enhanced support.

Conclusion

In this article, we have mentioned all the points necessary to Improve user experience and effective Web Design. If you are looking for an e-commerce website design company that takes care of all these points, you can checkout QualDev Inc.

The post 7 Essential Tips To Enhance Your Customer Experience with Effective Web Design appeared first on QualDev.

It is no longer enough to own a website in this highly competitive online ecosystem. You need to make regular updates to your eCommerce website to overcome every new challenge your competition throws at you. Your investments in eCommerce development will pay off handsomely by boosting traffic to your site, increasing sales conversions, and by providing other positive effects. This article highlights signs that serve to warn you that your website needs an update.

1. Poor Conversion

One of the biggest problems eCommerce stores have to contend with is poor conversion. It is a precursor for failure especially if you have good traffic. While most website owners focus on attracting traffic, there is less focus on conversions. This leads to failure. Many startups go to great lengths to create visibility and attract traffic. However, with poor conversions, their online businesses fail to turn a profit.

If you notice that the traffic on your website is good but conversions are low, it is time to update your website. There is a need for a re-evaluation of keywords to guarantee you attract relevant traffic. When you choose the right keywords, you can attract visitors who are more likely to convert. This step in the right direction will increase average order value.

2. Poor Page Load Speed

In this fast moving era of efficient technology, visitors bounce rate increases significantly when your website takes too long to load. It is important for website owners to check the speed at which the pages of their website load constantly. Multiple tools are available to help you do this. The best thing is that you also get suggestions on how to improve the loading speeds of your website. One of the major reasons for poor conversion is slow loading speeds. Heavy graphics and unnecessary functions could be the reason for an increase in the load time of individual pages and your website.

If your web pages take long to load, you can bet visitors will click away and go to your competitors. Carry out speed checks on all pages and use suggested strategies to improve page speeds. From enabling compression, minifying CSS, reducing redirects, using a content distribution network (CDN), minimizing HTTP requests, responsive web design, using asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files, Defer JavaScript loading, reducing server response time to choosing the right hosting option, there is so much you can do to improve page loading speeds.

3. Visitors do not browse beyond the home page

Visitors visit your website but do not continue to browse beyond the home page. This is a clear indication that your website needs a fresh look and maybe new features to engage visitors. Use ‘Google Analytics’ to analyze the different activities a visitor carries out on your website. That will help you and your web agency to update your website with what visitors were actually looking for.

4. High Bounce Rates

The best thing with owning an eCommerce store is the availability of data to help review the performance of your business. If you notice a high bounce rate, it means something is wrong with your website. It is time for an update because this affects conversion rates and can ruin the reputation of your business.

A website refresh is necessary to reduce bounce rates. You can adopt multiple strategies to make an update. These include improving content readability, avoiding disruption of the UX, increased page loading speeds, providing relevant content, using compelling call-to-action (CTA), adding fresh content, targeting keywords with high-value traffic, adding attractive Meta Descriptions and multiple landing pages for high-volume keywords. All these are techniques that are applicable during a website update.

5. Poor Ranking on SERPs

If your website ranks poorly for the keywords that you target, then you are not in business. Research shows that most internet users do not search beyond the first page of search engine result pages (SERPs). If you cannot find your website on the first page of SERPs, it is time for a website refresh. During a website update, you should first carry out a technical SEO audit to identify the problem areas in your SEO campaign.

To boost SEO ranking, the areas to address during a website update include fixing duplicate content, improving site speeds, optimizing for mobile viewing, on-page optimization, using unique brief and descriptive titles, crafting ‘clickable’ meta descriptions, adding relevant content, alternative text descriptions (Alt tags) and a variety of other things. Working with an experienced SEO services provider helps you leverage the best techniques and gives you an edge over your competition.

6. Unappealing Website

While eCommerce website performance depends on more than just looks, you must create a glance-friendly website to captivate your visitors. Internet users have an infamous short attention span, making it necessary for you to work hard to capture their attention before they turn away.

Visual appeal is crucial because your website is your online storefront. If you have a website that looks poor, it creates a bad impression and reflects badly on your brand. This might not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of AOV calculation but it should. Web visitors want to interact with an interesting website while shopping. This is a good reason to invest in a website update. Such a project will have a direct impact on your revenues.

7. Security Concerns

Security is one of the greatest concerns for online businesses today. There is an increase in online fraud and you have to update your website to guarantee the security of your visitors. Most security options on older websites are obsolete and you need to refresh your website to avoid costly data breaches on your eCommerce store.

Updating your website also helps you stay compliant with new security regulations. You should consider the hosting you use for your website during the website update. You should look to use cutting edge security tools while you plan to refresh your website.

8. Keeping Up With Brand Changes

Times change and this means your brand may change with time. If you have a website, you need to incorporate such changes in it to create a seamless experience for your customers. It is untenable to rebrand and fail to make any changes to your website. Make sure your website reflects your brand as this will boost customer trust and loyalty.

A website refresh is a crucial part of eCommerce development as it helps reduce bounce rates, boost conversion, improve site speeds, build customer loyalty, grow your market reach through responsive web design and boost security on your website. Working with a renowned eCommerce web development company allows you to plan a comprehensive approach while redesigning your website to improve all aspects of your site.

The post Know When It Is Time For You To Refresh Your Website appeared first on QualDev.

A website provides a platform from which a brand can connect to consumers, display their products and services and keep the online audience informed about the latest happenings at their company.

A website is an integral medium to promote your business and reach people across the globe. If your website is difficult to navigate and provides a poor user experience, it can affect your brand negatively.

Check out here some of the effective design tips to improve user experience and engagement on your website:

Create a responsive version

Smartphone users and iPad users are increasing day by day. It is important for a brand to create a responsive or mobile-friendly website. People love to browse the web on their phones when they want to look for products or services they require.

If your website does not function properly on mobile phones, it leaves a negative effect on your brand. There is always a requirement for responsive web design so that your website runs properly across all electronic devices.

Also, using more mobile friendly plugins provides consumers with an enriching browsing experience and can lead to a greater amount of revenue.

Improve page load time

When an online user visits your website, they expect the page to load quickly. A page that loads slowly is a cause for frustration, and it might lead visitors to leave your site before they even purchase your product.

So, remember to check the speed of the pages on your site and see whether they work on all devices like laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. The site should load fast across all platforms and offer online users a good browsing experience.

So, ask your web development company to work on improving load speed rates to lower bounce rates and increase sessions.

Simplify your website navigation process

It is very important for a brand to simplify the navigation process on their website. Visitors often find a website’s navigation process to be very complicated.

As a result, they leave the site never to return. So, try to make the navigation process as simple as you can so that users can browse through the website without any hassle.

Try to keep your navigation intuitive, make your labels descriptive and try not to have more than seven menu items.

Usage of white space

It has often been seen that business owners think that too much of white space on a website is a big no-no! They think that a website should be packed with as much information as possible.

However, market research has revealed a very different story altogether. White spaces around headings and titles have a positive influence on user attention. It also gives webpage a fresh, open and modern look.

So, as a brand owner, it is important for you to understand this and explain this to UI or UX design company you hire to develop your site.

Create an impressive home page

The homepage is a summarized version of your entire site. Online users will look at this page when they visit your site for the first time.

It is the entryway to your website and most users observe this page to determine whether they would navigate further on your website, or not. Websites with the best UX are easy to follow and simplistic in nature.

Their design is not overwhelming and is yet good enough to impress online users at the first chance. The home page should have a design comprising of subheadings, short paragraphs containing sentences, large texts, and bullet points to enhance user engagement as well as conversions.

Define clear call to action

Apart from having a responsive web design version of your website, it is important for you to have the proper call to action that guides user behavior. A call to action button on your homepage is always helpful for increasing conversion rates on your website.

Reputed SEO services provider suggest that instead of a text link, a call to action button can increase conversion rates to a considerable extent.

If you wish that the call to action you use should be game-changing, then make sure to use words like “discover’, “start” or “learn” in it.

Use bullet points

Bullet points, headlines and any sort of numbered lists are always helpful in capturing user attention. This is a great way to provide all the information visitors require quickly and efficiently.

You can always get creative with bullet points by using icons and images that would stress on the point you are trying to make and to stick to the tone your brand sets.

Use realistic and relevant images

A photo, video, or a GiF is something we all love to see. The use of realistic stock photos is more likely to draw attention to a page.

According to research, users spend 10% more time to look at the pictures on the “about us” page rather than reading the page content.

So, when you are giving a UX design company the responsibility of developing your website, ask them to incorporate great visuals for better user engagement. Also, custom illustrations are always a great idea to improve user experience and engagement at the same time.

When compared to regular stick images, customized illustrations have proved to be helpful in keeping visitors on your site.

The post 8 Actionable Web Design Tips to Improve User Experience appeared first on QualDev.

‘What is the difference between Fluid, Adaptive and Responsive Web Layout Design Technology?’

Differentiating between fluid, adaptive and responsive design technology is difficult. Clients ask to know about the differences in these technologies. This post helps clear confusions by shedding light on in-trend technologies that we use to create web solutions having high-end customized user experience irrespective of the device used.

You could also choose the best Layout Design Approach for your website, by weighing the pros and cons of each approach

Our Opinion

In our opinion, Responsive Web Design is the most efficient of the three approaches, as it combines the benefits of both fluid and adaptive design.

The content adjusts to fix the resolution of the screen. On larger screens, layouts would spread out to occupy all the space available, whereas on smaller screens layout elements would rearrange themselves to show properly on the screen. This means that you do not need to have multiple tailor layouts for every different screen size that exists, instead the programming for the layout determines the size of the screen and its resolution and then resizes and reorganizes elements on the layout so that they display properly.

Are you interested in knowing more about latest technologies, designing and developing trends, or in receiving statistics and comparisons? Leave your comments and suggestions for the next topic you would like to read about and we will post information for that.

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