When it comes to your business website, great design is more important than ever in 2014 and our advice includes clean simple layouts, succinct headlines, vibrant call to action buttons and responsive designs that recognise every visitor’s screen size and adapts accordingly.

At Kwik Kopy, we would love to see every client achieve a fresh, modern and conversion-focused website. Your website is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. When customers’ are unable to reach you, then your website is available to answer your customers’ questions for you.

It’s important to make a great first impression and get the design of your website just right. Top of the list for 2014 is ensuring that you have a responsive website. In fact, we would go as far as to say this should be your number one marketing goal for this year in order to increase your traffic. This means having a web design that is capable of adjusting to fit desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers.

One framework over multiple devices, your responsive design will detect the device your user is visiting from and adjust the site accordingly. And as an added bonus – Google loves it! So your design will improve your search engine rankings too.

A responsive website means it looks good on whatever you’re looking it up on – your smartphone, tablet or desktop. Kwik Kopy can advise you on whether it is possible to update your existing website to be responsive or whether you’ll need to go through a complete redesign (which could be a possibility if you haven’t updated your web design in several years).

In fact, your website design needs to evolve, not only with your business as it grows but also with design trends to avoid becoming dated. A dated website can affect your brand credibility and see a potential increase in customer engagement.

Flat user Interface

This is popular amongst us website designers because it’s easy to create easy-to-navigate, intuitive websites that users really love. Clean designs with lots of beautiful ‘hero’ shots of your products, simple to-the-point headlines and vivid call to action buttons make everything really clear and easy to use for your customers.

Simple landing pages

These tell the user in no uncertain terms, exactly what you have to offer, how much it costs and what they need to do to get it.

Social validation

We want to ensure that your website contains content that visitors will definitely want to share. Believe us that the higher the engagement numbers, the more likely people are to share your content, simply because a lot of other people already shared it. A blog is a great way to increase customer engagement, improve your search engine rankings (SEO) and add value to each customer’s experience of your brand.

Keywords

In order to have a strong online presence you need to have strong keywords, but the keywords that worked for you this time last year might not be working for you now. Analyse your target audience’s search habits and your website data to ensure your keywords are as strong as they should be.

Look at your analytics

Crunching the numbers will help you get a better idea for what is currently working on the site and what could be improved. Taking note of the landing pages and pages with high bounce rates as well as tracking where the bulk of your traffic is coming from will help refine your overall website content and design.

The future is mobile

If you truly want to be competitive in today’s marketplace then a mobile optimised website should be at the top of your to-do list. If you’re not providing a mobile-friendly experience for your customers then chances are they’ll bounce off your website and head straight to your competitors. Businesses with mobile-friendly content see significant increases in sales, customer retention and customer satisfaction.

With a professionally designed website that is an extension of your brand, your site becomes part of the experience of doing business with you. A well-designed website creates a professional image online that will separate you from the competition and see you become the supplier of choice.