Azuro Digital Shares Their Top 5 Web Design Tips

As one of North America's leading web design agencies, Azuro Digital has valuable insight when it comes to best practices in the web design space.

Azuro Digital has provided us with a breakdown of their top 5 most important web design tips for any company or organization that's looking to improve their digital presence:

Use WordPress

First things first—which web development platform/framework should you use?

Azuro recommends using WordPress, as it's been found to be the most flexible option on the market. As an open-source platform, WordPress allows designers and developers to leverage a wide variety of technology within the ecosystem to achieve any type of design or functionality that they require.

WordPress is also user-friendly, allowing anyone within your company—regardless of their level of expertise—to quickly learn the platform and make certain adjustments to the website themselves (without needing to rely on a professional developer for every single task).

Another glaring advantage of WordPress is the fact that it gives companies access to the largest possible talent pool. WordPress is by far the most popular web development platform, powering over 40% of all websites on the internet (with Shopify coming in 2nd place at about 3%). This also means that there are far more web designers and developers who specialize in WordPress compared to any other platform, giving companies a wider talent pool to select from when seeking a freelancer, agency, or full-time staff for web design and development.

Focus on Conversions

According to Azuro's founder, one of their mottos is to "focus on bottom-line results, not just a beautiful design."

It's important to motivate website visitors to take action and maximize the percentage of website visitors who perform an action that you want them to take, such as filling out a contact form or purchasing a product.

In many cases, designers get fixated on creating a flashy design concept and end up harming the user experience and conversion rate as a result. Sticking to certain web design standards is crucial, and while it might be tempting to deviate from the norm, you need to be careful not to go overboard. Keeping it simple is best for most companies.

So, what are some ways to maximize conversions? Here are some of Azuro's top tips for conversion rate optimization:

1. Leverage social proof (testimonials, stats, certification logos, etc.).
2. Make your calls-to-action noticeable, frequent & enticing.
3. Invest in professional copywriting.
4. Perform competitor research.
5. Keep it simple.
6. Maximize site speed.

Prioritize SEO

What's the point of a website if it doesn't generate any traffic?

SEO certainly isn't the only way to generate traffic, but it often has the best return on investment compared to any other channel. This is because you're able to attract website visitors with high purchase intent and a lower cost per lead (in the long run) compared to other channels.

For example, people who are Googling for a specific product are much more serious about purchasing compared to someone who clicks on an ad that they see on their social media feed. Also, once you're ranking highly for your target keywords, you don't need to spend nearly as much money for traffic compared to paid channels such as Facebook ads, Google ads, etc.

Azuro recommends focusing on SEO from the very beginning while you're designing and developing your website. Here are the top tasks to execute with precision:

1. Keyword research
2. Competitor analysis
3. On-page optimization (content creation)
4. Internal linking & effective page structure/website architecture
5. Technical optimization (site speed, HTML tags, page titles, meta descriptions, schema markup, redirects, link structure, ALT text, mobile optimization, Google Search Console setup, etc.)
6. Local SEO (Google Business Profile & Google Maps)
7. Ongoing content creation
8. Backlink generation

Come Up with Multiple Concepts

Coming up with the perfect design concept the first time around isn't likely. It typically requires some experimentation and taking a few different approaches. From there, you should get feedback from various stakeholders, and you might decide to mix and match the best pieces of each concept to create the best possible version.

Test Everything

When comparing different concepts or when trying to maximize the conversion rate or SEO results, it's always best to test with real data. Subjective opinions aren't reliable.

So, when the site is launched, Azuro recommends testing multiple versions of certain pages through Google Ads in order to test and optimize the conversion rate. This is also known as A/B testing or split testing.

Using Google Ads allows you to test multiple versions of the same page at the same time to the same type of audience (based on their keyword search). This reduces the possibility of the data being skewed by various factors such as time of year, user intent, etc. It's also important for each version to get a minimum of 1,000 visitors from the ads to have sufficient data and for each version to get roughly the same number of visitors.

When testing SEO results, you unfortunately can't leverage Google Ads. Instead, you need to make adjustments and have the new version run for 1-3 months. From there, you can measure the data in Google Search Console and continue to make changes from there—one version at a time.

Have questions?

If you have any questions or would like assistance in building your new website, we recommend contacting Azuro Digital at AzuroDigital.com!