Creating and designing a website goes hand in hand with being a business owner in the digital age. A website serves as a gateway to your business, providing visitors with information about what you have to offer, how to get in touch with you and more. But creating a website isn’t just about providing informational content. Creating a pleasant user experience (UX) for visitors is equally important.
What Exactly Is UX?
UX or “user experience” is a term that is often used in digital marketing. It refers to the user-centric method in which software, websites, and apps are designed. UX focuses on designing these products in a way that meets the needs of users and provides a positive overall experience.
Why Having A UX Friendly Website Is Important
One can never overemphasize the importance of good UX in digital marketing. With the ever-changing landscape of technology, companies have to do whatever it takes to stay relevant. This especially applies to website design because in today’s digital world a website is an extension of your brand.
As a digital marketer, you need to create a fun, engaging experience for users online. This will encourage people to return to your website in the future. To create the ideal digital environment you need to start by choosing a website theme that is UX friendly.
What Exactly Is A Website Theme?
A website theme refers to the collection of template styles and layout sheets that are used to create and display the content of a website. These themes contain code and data that enables you to display text, media, images and other elements on your website.
Things To Consider When Choosing A Website Theme
One can never overemphasize the importance of choosing the right website theme. You may not realize it, but theme selection is just as important as an SEO strategy. Since it can sometimes be a little tricky, we have a compiled a list of the most important points to consider when choosing a theme for your website.
Market Specific Design
There are literally thousands of themes available on hosting websites. So it’s important to remember that the theme you choose needs to cater to your specific market. For example, a writer would need a portfolio friendly theme, whereas a seamstress selling handmade dolls would need an eCommerce friendly theme.
Browser Compatibility
It’s not uncommon for some themes to work great on a laptop and poorly on a mobile device. The best way to overcome avoid this problem is by testing the theme’s live preview in different environments before settling on it. Remember it’s always preferable for your chosen theme to be compatible on all internet browsers.
Responsiveness
A responsive theme will allow your website to adapt its layout to the device on which your website is being viewed (laptop, mobile device, tablet, etc). Responsiveness is very important these days because people tend to do most of their internet browsing on mobile devices. If a website is not responding well it ruins the overall user experience for visitors to your website. This also has a negative effect on your search engine ranking.
Easy Customization
It’s pretty pointless to have a beautiful theme if it’s near impossible to add your own elements to it without being a master coder. No matter how cool the primary design might be, your theme needs to be easily customizable. At the very least your theme should come with detailed instructions on how to edit its layout and functions.
SEO Friendly
All marketers know that an effective SEO strategy plays an important role in a website’s overall success. Your website needs to appear on the first page of online searches to attract the desired traffic. So it’s important that your theme has the right features for you to execute your SEO strategy. These features need to include:
- Light code that has very no (or very few) flaws in that could cause your website to be slow.
- Load speed that isn’t too slow. If your theme loads too slowly it can harm your SEO and search rankings.
- Easy access to website content is the most basic UX requirement. It shouldn’t take more than two clicks for a user to find what they’re looking for. This will improve your SEO and make your website visitors happy too.
- Schema or “rich snippets” markup is pretty new in digital marketing, but it’s an essential part of SEO. Schema refers to the tags that are added to the code of your website which help search engines find your content and give users more details about it. Nowadays schema markup is included in website theme by default but it’s worth making sure that your theme has that feature.
