Quality images instead of quantity Neville Brody, the famous graphic designer, typographer, and art director once said that digital design is like a painting, except the paint never dries.
It is an excellent piece of advice to keep in mind while designing a website or a blog using WordPress. Some design elements are necessary at the time of setting up the website or blog, but there are several elements that can be incorporated later too. Sites need to evolve continually to maintain high search ranking and provide a quality user experience.
Table of Contents
Value addition
The content of a website or a blog would surely be of interest and use to a visitor. However, you can also provide related links and resources to add more value to your offering. It will help the visitors realize that you are making an effort in helping them out.
Providing links to other resources on a particular website would also open up the possibility of that website being listed and backlinked by those sites or blogs. It would impact the search rankings positively.
Spread the good word
Having a social media presence is critical to the success of any brand. You can encourage visitors to share your website or blog on social media by providing them easy access to social sharing buttons on your site. Even if a visitor is happy with the content, it is not likely that he or she would take the trouble of manually sharing the link to the site on his or her social media profile.
Adding social sharing buttons only takes a few minutes, and if you are confident that your page will be widely shared, you can also keep a counter near the buttons which would display how many times the article or the page has been shared so far.
A good sitemap
A website can have several related segments of content, but the variety of content might be of no use if it is not appropriately categorized. It improves the user experience and leads to better search optimization. It also offers easy navigability between different sections of the site.
User interaction
An excellent blog should make it easy for a visitor to provide feedback and interact with the webmaster. Some web pages make it too cumbersome for a visitor to add a comment. Most visitors will not have the energy to fill up a registration form only to comment. Also, all kinds of feedback, whether negative or positive, should be welcomed and responded to.
The human face of content
If a website has sections written by different contributors, it is better to acknowledge the contribution, and preferably have a short biography and a picture of the author.
Enable transactions
More and more websites and even blogs are now designed to enable some form of e-commerce, whether to buy a product or to enroll for weekly content. While creating the site, it would be a good idea to incorporate e-commerce elements into the design so that when the website or blog starts to generate opportunities for financial transactions, the features are already present.
Designers often add too many images or graphics or videos to the pages in an attempt to make it more exciting to the audience. It can sometimes go overboard if not done optimally, and the visitor would be distracted from the actual content of the website.
It is a much better idea to add images only when they accentuate the content, and it is also necessary to add high-quality photos for the best results. Good quality stock photos are available at affordable prices, and designers can use them for various purposes.
Try video
Apart from images, many great websites also use videos. It is no secret that videos are more popular with visitors than static pictures. However, the use of videos has two things to be careful of. The page loading speed might be affected if too many videos are inserted. On the other hand, just like images, too many videos can also distract the visitor. So, the right balance between videos and text must be stuck.
Smart use of themes
WordPress provides several free themes that designers can customize based on their specific needs. Even though the free themes are of good quality, some website owners prefer premium or paid ones that offer unique appeal and exclusive features. The theme dictates the overall look and feel of a website or blog, and it is an essential factor in deciding how well-accepted the website or blog is. Content is king, but a good theme is a throne on which the king sits, and it should be as good as the content.
Organic SEO
There is a reason content has gained such massive prominence over the years. Engaging content is the best way to improve the search engine rankings of a page and ensuring an increased flow of traffic to the website. Unless the content is useful to the visitor or provides at least some solutions to the issues he or she is facing, the webpage will not go too far, even if the other useful features of WordPress are used. Every reputable web design company follows this principle.
Paid traffic
There are several ways in which a website can get likes and comments in the initial days of existence, and one of them is paying an agency that can get the required traffic. The problem with this solution is that it can invite penalties from Google if bots are used for these instead of real users. If the agency can provide likes and comments by real users instead of bots, the initial push on the search engine results page can be obtained.
There is no foolproof formula for optimizing a WordPress site or blog to drive the best results from the first day, but the tips mentioned above can surely help when it comes to designing an efficient website.
