How Web Design Impacts Content Marketing

Web design is about so much more than creating an aesthetic site and making it stand out above the competition.

A well-functioning site considers everything from accessibility, readability, and seamless navigation to brand consistency and the overall user experience. 

Let’s break down how web design can better support your content marketing efforts.

Accessibility

Creating well-written, helpful content is not enough to drive target audience engagement; it must also be easy to find and access.

An accessible website helps people regardless of abilities navigate your site and become more familiar with your brand. At the same time, universal design principles also helps improve performance on SERPs.

Sites should clearly display navigation menu to help people easily discover content. It’s also important to consider color contrast, font, and utilize image alt text, among other crucial design choices. Without a clear roadmap, users will likely grow frustrated and find the information they’re looking for elsewhere. It’s akin to owning an overly cluttered and poorly mapped brick and mortar business and having people walk out confused and unlikely to ever return.

Additionally, a poorly designed site presents challenges for people utilizing screen reading software, text-to-speech systems, and other assistive technologies.

Readability & Comprehension

Your goal should be to draw attention to the site’s core content.

Speaking of content, your writing should be clear and concise. While we’re all proud of our work and want people to fully engage in the copy, the truth is people are more likely scan a particular article or site page. With that in mind, you want to have clear visual hierarchy and leverage white space so users can have a more enjoyable experience.

When laying out text, consider aspects such as font scale, line item spacing, and spacing between letters to enhance readability.

For instance, consider how a user might process information presented as a continuous block of text instead of breaking it up into small paragraphs. Without enough spacing and white space, users tend to have more difficulty absorbing information. 

Additionally, white space has been shown to ease reading difficulties and improve content understanding for those with learning and cognitive disabilities, according to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which develops standards to improve digital inclusion.

According to WAI, white space “reduces clutter and provides definition to content. This gives the viewer a clear overview of a web page.” 

Appeal & Brand Consistency

The old advice to “never judge a book by its cover” simply does not apply here because the average user takes just 2.66 seconds to decide if a web page is useful. 

In fact, a survey of more than 200 web designers and freelancers analyzed by software development firm GoodFirms found that outdated design (38.5%) was one of the top reasons visitors left a website, along with slow loading time (88.5%), non-responsiveness (73.1%), bad navigation (61.5%), and poor content structure (34.6%).

Accessible sites that follow best practices help reinforce a brand’s image and projects confidence, ultimately driving engagement. 

Of course, your digital marketing strategy must go beyond developing and maintaining an appealing website. If successful, your content decisions should generate increased traffic and bring in new users who may very well be life-long customers and fans of your product or service. That’s why it’s important that you also prioritize brand consistency. 

What does that mean? Well, utilize the same color palette across mediums, place logos and associated icons on digital assets, keep fonts consistent, and create branding guidelines so the entire team is aligned with a vision. This ensures every touchstone associated with your organization—from downloadable one-pagers to social media graphics—is recognizable and brand-aligned.

When deciding on branding colors and font, organizations should consider how these aspects impact site performance and conversions. For instance, reds, greens, oranges, and yellow call to action (CTA) buttons yield higher conversion rates than black, grays, or browns, and serif fonts have been shown to help sighted users with content comprehension.

User Experience & Site Flow 

Sites should guide users to take a desired action. One way to accomplish that is by making sure the site is easy to navigate. 

In fact, 60% of consumers rated usability as an important characteristic of an online shop’s design, according to a report from market and consumer data platform Statista.

This comes down to having an optimized user experience (UX)—how easily visitors can navigate a site, which includes everything from discoverability and credibility to value and usefulness. 

Many of the previous fundamentals are key to this. Prioritizing visual hierarchy, balance, white space, scale, and increased colour contrast are all instrumental site-level design elements to help guide users toward a desired action.

Certain page-level design elements can also contribute to user experience. For example, say your goal is to gain 50 email contacts by the end of the quarter. Within a landing page, consider embedding a link to a free downloadable content offer to analyze user behaviour. 

Importantly, these design decisions not only contribute to a better user experience, but they improve search engine optimization (SEO)—helping you rank higher on SERPs. In fact, site design and structure are among the top factors search engines analyze when determining your site’s SEO value and rank.

To continuously optimize over time, brands should practice growth-driven design strategies that update sites in response to tests and performance. For instance, modifying aspects of a site’s design in response to A/B testing and performance helps ensure you maintain an optimized user experience.

Designing an Impactful Website That Showcases Your Content 

By prioritizing accessibility, user experience, and brand consistency throughout the design process, organizations can ensure their content is more digestible, makes an impression, and fulfills its intended purpose of guiding users on a specific path.

These considerations are heavily impactful for SERP rankings, which help establish your brand as an industry authority, get you noticed by prospects, and exceed your marketing goals.

As perhaps one of the most crucial elements to a marketing strategy, it is important organizations partner with trusted agencies to bring website design visions to life.

From growth-driven strategy to accessibility, harnessing the power of web design enables your brand to fuel content marketing efforts to attract, engage, and delight your target audience.