Having a professional web design is crucial to a successful business, especially these days. Search engines like Google have been changing the game in significant ways over the last decade, and content creation, digital marketing strategies, and other aspects of successful SEO need to be done right if a brand hopes to stay competitive. Professional web design is one key element to an overall internet marketing strategy. Here are five important things that have to go into your website development.

1. You have to be optimized for mobile use. This is no longer an option, and Google has made it next to impossible to be near the top of any search results without a mobile-friendly site. This only makes sense because 50% of mobile phone owners are now using those phone as their primary way of accessing the internet. Things have changed so much, in fact, that in 2017 a report showed that 81% of all marketing professionals said they were optimizing videos for mobile viewing.
2. You need a homepage that’s free from clutter and has a minimalist look. Part of today’s professional web design is producing a site that understands people rarely read whole sentences. They scan, and in their scanning they’re picking out the sentences and keywords that pop out as relevant to them. Appeals to emotions are more effective on a website than high word count, and you want to make it easy for people landing on your page to process what they need to do next and remember what they want to do after that. Clear text with bold calls to action are important, and both headings and subheadings need to clear and simple. Paragraphs should be clutter-free and communicative, and you need to employ images and icons whenever feasible.
3. When you do include more in-depth text, make it easy to read. The key to professional web design when it comes to reaching is making it easy to efficiently get through the information on your site. This means contrasting, but not shocking, colors. It also means fonts of at least 16 points in size, but even larger if you’re using certain fonts. People need to be able to read it one a screen 24 inches from their face. This also means not using a whole lot of different fonts, which looks messy and unprofessional and typically using sans serif fonts.
4. Make sure it’s easy to navigate your site. There are plenty of areas of business where it pays to be unique. Website design isn’t one of them. People have certain expectations about how sites work; for example where the drop-down menu will be located or where to initiate a search of the site. They will quickly get tired of trying to navigate your special and unique design, and 94% of consumers cite poor web design as a reason to mistrust or reject a site. Almost 50% say that your website’s design is the number one factor in deciding whether or not you are credible as a business.
5. Whatever else you do, you must incorporate social media. This is also no longer an option. Animoto’s State of Social Video report from 2017 showed that 64% of people had bought something in the previous month after watching a marketing video on Facebook. For B2B marketers, 94% are using LinkedIn as part of their content strategy, and SalesForce Marketing Cloud reports that 83% of customers either “love it” or “like it” when they get a social media response from a business.

As you work towards the professional web design you want, don’t forget to include social media, to make it mobile friendly, and to make it easy to read and navigate. To make sure you’re really getting the most out of your website, get one of the best internet marketing companies on your side. Then you can be assured of professional web design, effective mobile SEO, and an online business marketing strategy that really works.