In today’s digital landscape, nearly anyone can design and run a website, but not everyone succeeds at making their website truly effective. A website is much more than just pretty pictures and text—it requires strategic planning, well-crafted content, and seamless functionality to stand out from the competition, especially for industries like law firms where professionalism and clarity are paramount.

Ultimately, the success of a website hinges on how user-friendly it is. This guide will walk you through the key elements of a user-friendly website and how to win over your audience with a website homepage that excels in law firm website design and beyond.

What Should Be on the Home Page of a Website?

The homepage is often the first interaction users have with your website, making it the most crucial page to get right. Whether you’re focusing on law firm website design or another industry, your homepage should immediately communicate who you are, what you do, and how users can benefit from your services. Here are the essential components that every website homepage should include:

• Clear Value Proposition: Your homepage should clearly state what your business offers within seconds of landing on your page. This is especially important in law firm website design, where clarity and professionalism are key.

• Easy-to-Find Navigation: The main navigation menu should be intuitive and accessible, guiding users effortlessly to the information they seek. User-friendly website navigation is critical to keeping visitors engaged.

• Engaging Visuals: Use high-quality images and graphics that align with your brand’s message. Avoid clutter, but ensure the page is visually appealing.

• Call to Action (CTA): Encourage users to take the next step with prominent, strategically placed CTAs. This could be scheduling a consultation for a law firm or exploring services.

• Social Proof: Include testimonials, reviews, or client logos to build trust and credibility with new visitors. Social proof is an important element of a good website, particularly in industries that rely on reputation.

5 Important Elements of a User-Friendly Website

Many businesses, including law firms, make the mistake of prioritizing aesthetics or content over usability. However, user-friendly websites prioritize the user experience, making it easy for visitors to find what they need and take action. Below are the elements of a good website that are critical to user-friendly design.

1. Simple Website Navigation

A well-planned and easy-to-navigate website is crucial for user-friendliness. Clear, concise page titles and a logically organized menu bar are essential. Overcrowding the menu or burying important information can frustrate users and increase bounce rates. For law firm website design, it’s important to ensure that key information like practice areas, attorney profiles, and contact information are easy to find.

2. Aesthetic Appeal

While aesthetic appeal isn’t everything, it plays a significant role in user experience. A visually appealing website with professional, high-quality images and a clean layout can enhance usability. Consistent branding across your website strengthens your brand identity and makes your website more recognizable and trustworthy. This is particularly true in law firm website design, where a professional appearance can set the tone for client trust.

3. Responsive / Mobile Compatibility

With the majority of users accessing websites from mobile devices, mobile compatibility is non-negotiable. A responsive website adjusts seamlessly to different screen sizes, ensuring a smooth user experience regardless of the device. Test your site with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure it meets mobile usability standards. Designing user-friendly web design that works well on mobile devices is crucial, especially for industries like law, where clients may be searching for legal services on the go.

4. Simple, Scannable Content

In today’s fast-paced world, users don’t have the time or patience for long blocks of text. Most users skim content, looking for key information. Make your content easy to scan by using clear, bold headings, subheadings, and bullet points. This approach helps users quickly find the information they need, improving the overall user experience. This is a critical aspect of creating a user-friendly website.

5. Quick Loading Time

A slow website can deter visitors and harm your search engine rankings. In fact, if your page takes longer than 6 seconds to load, you risk losing potential customers. Optimize your website’s speed by compressing images, minimizing the use of heavy scripts, and utilizing fast hosting solutions. A faster website not only enhances user experience but also boosts SEO performance. This is a key aspect of user-friendly website design.

Additional Resources for Creating a User-Friendly Website

Creating a user-friendly website involves understanding both your audience and the technical aspects of web design. Below are some additional resources that can help you refine your website:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: Analyze and optimize your website’s speed to ensure a user-friendly experience.

• Mobile-Friendly Test by Google: Ensure your website performs well on mobile devices.

• Yoast SEO: Improve your on-page SEO, making your site more accessible to search engines.

• Hotjar: Gain insights into user behavior on your website to make data-driven improvements.

Indicators of Website Success

Success in web design isn’t just about aesthetics or content; it’s about how well your site performs with its intended audience. Key indicators of a successful, user-friendly website include:

• Low Bounce Rate: Users engage with your content and explore multiple pages.

• High Conversion Rate: Visitors are taking the desired actions, whether it’s scheduling a consultation, filling out a contact form, or subscribing to a newsletter.

• Positive User Feedback: Consistent, positive feedback from users suggests that your website is meeting their needs.

• Search Engine Ranking: A user-friendly website often ranks higher on search engines due to better usability and optimized content.

The Importance of Social Proof

Incorporating social proof into your website design is a powerful way to build credibility. Whether through client testimonials, case studies, or user reviews, showing that others trust your services can significantly influence new visitors. This is especially important in law firm website design, where trust is a crucial factor in converting visitors into clients.

The Benefits of a User-Friendly Website

Investing in a user-friendly website offers numerous benefits:

• Improved User Experience: Easier navigation and faster load times create a more enjoyable experience for your visitors.

• Higher Search Engine Rankings: Search engines favor websites that provide a good user experience, which can boost your rankings.

• Increased Conversions: A well-designed website that’s easy to use encourages more visitors to convert into clients.

• Enhanced Brand Reputation: A professional, user-friendly website strengthens your brand’s reputation, making it more appealing to potential customers.

Looking For Professional Website Design?

If you’re in need of a user-friendly website that stands out in today’s competitive digital landscape, Exults is your go-to partner for internet success. Whether you need a website overhaul or a completely new design, our team has the expertise to take your project from concept to completion.

Ready to Elevate Your Online Presence?

Learn more about our mobile compatibility web design services and how we can help you create a user-friendly website that not only looks great but also drives results. Contact Exults today for a consultation.

The post Key Elements Every User-Friendly Website Should Have appeared first on Exults Digital Marketing Agency.

It’s no secret that having a mobile-friendly website can increase your conversions and help you skyrocket to the top of search engine results.

The only problem?

You’re not quite sure how to make a website mobile friendly.

Read on to learn how to create a design that works across multiple mobile devices and operating systems.

Then, learn where you can go to find the professional digital marketing help you need to take your desktop and mobile sites to the next level.

Optimize Your Images

While a giant photograph of some of your top-selling products or smiling clients might be eye-catching on a desktop site, oversized images can slow loading speed to a crawl — and seriously mess with the formatting — on a mobile device.

Instead, make sure the images you use on a mobile version of the website are as light as possible. Switch to JavaScript, choose one central image as opposed to a slideshow, and post lower resolution photos.

Don’t forget to crop and study up on the aspect ratio to seriously save on bandwidth and ensure images load quickly and completely.

Stop the Autoplay

We know that video marketing is on the rise, and it’s true that it can be an excellent addition to your overall digital marketing plan.

However, stop to consider if it really belongs on a mobile-friendly website.

Eliminate the autoplay features of a video, and instead allow mobile users to click on a link to be redirected to a video instead.

When it comes to choosing the right mobile video player for a mobile site? We suggest going with an HTML5 player, which is compatible with most mobile devices.

While we’re on the subject of automatic features — skip the pop-ups and automatic redirects to an app store or another site. Not only will it slow things down, but it’s also off-putting to consumers.

Consider Site Design

The final step in learning how to make your website mobile friendly.

Make sure that you’ve optimized your overall site design.

First off, make sure to include follow buttons to your social media profiles, and always ensure your contact information is visible.

When you look at your website, search for things that can be cut. This includes excess plugins, large images, slow-loading graphics, and especially giant walls of text.

Remember that the mobile screen is much smaller than a desktop, so aim to de-clutter your mobile website as much as you can.

Above all, if you include appointment request forms, question and answer forms, or contact forms on your mobile site, ensure they’re mobile friendly.

Otherwise, none of your hard work will pay off!

Need Professional Help Creating a Mobile Friendly Website?

Sometimes, the best way to create a mobile-friendly website is to leave it to the professionals.

That’s where we come in.

We’re a full-service digital marketing agency, which means that we can help you with mobile-friendly design in addition to SEO, social media, and more.

When you’re ready to transform your site and web presence as a whole, reach out to us.

The post Going Mobile: 3 Tips for a Mobile-Friendly Website Design appeared first on Exults Digital Marketing Agency.

At Exults, each of our Platoons has submitted what they believe to be the biggest changes, developments, or trends they’ve seen this year. So don your best white outfit, grab your frozen grapes and empty suitcases, and enjoy this compilation of this year’s noteworthy internet marketing trends as we count down to 2016.

Search Engine Optimization

Now that the doomsday hoopla has settled down and SEOs everywhere have adjusted to what optimizing for the search engines means today, we saw some very interesting trends emerge.

1. The Rise of Video

Video is a great addition to any website or marketing portfolio. You can create a fun explainer video to help summarize what you do, use it to enhance your site’s design, or reach new audiences on YouTube. There are several benefits to developing original video content and even more ways to leverage it including:

• Developing a branded YouTube channel and uploading your videos with optimized titles and descriptions
• Adding a video to pages on your site with lower engagement metrics to help increase time on site
• Creating a unique look on your website and showcasing your work with a video header

2. Engagement Above All

With each new algorithm refresh, update, or shift comes mandatory changes to strategy. You can choose to be flexible and adjust, or succumb to the “SEO is dead” swan song. What we’ve learned this year is engaging visitors is what matters most. Providing great content, multi-screen support, and incorporating mixed media will win users over. So how do you measure engagement? Generally speaking, your website should answer the questions that your customers are asking. If you follow that rule, visitors will likely reward you by browsing several pages and spending some time exploring your site. That, my friends, is engagement.

3. Responsive Design

As mentioned above, multi-screen support is one of the biggest changes we’ve seen this year. With Google Bot now crawling CSS files to check for responsiveness, and Mobilegeddon happening in the same year, it should come as no surprise that usability from any device is a ranking signal. Not sure if you’re responsive? Take the test.

Sponsored Search

Google’s AdWords platform remains one of the most effective forms of advertising in the digital age. With a sound strategy and an experienced agency, the phrase “AdWords doesn’t work” is poppycock. Not only were we lucky enough to travel to Google HQ this year for the Google Partners Summit, but we also had the opportunity to try out several AdWords betas that soon became official products.

1. Dynamic Remarketing

This product was available in beta mid 2014 and officially rolled out late last year. Dynamic Remarketing makes your display campaigns more versatile than ever by catering creative to exactly what the user was looking for on your site before they left. Our favorite application of this product might just be eCommerce websites with Google Shopping; users are retargeted with the products they were looking at on sites they’ve abandoned.

2. Customer Match

Taking notes from Facebook (which has had the Custom Audience feature for quite some time), Customer match allows advertisers to target users based on their email address and show them ads while they’re searching. The applications of this feature are endless, which makes it one of the most exciting betas we have been a part of to date.

3. Target ROAS bidding for eCommerce

As an agency we don’t use bidding strategies very often, but target ROAS bidding for high volume Shopping campaigns has proven to be quite useful. Unlike most of the other flexible bidding strategies that are available, implementing this bidding strategy actually gives us more control over performance (instead of less). By defining our target return on ad spend metric, we force campaigns to perform within set parameters.

Social Media

When it comes to online marketing, social media is a heavily debated topic. Developing a Social Media Marketing strategy that is profitable for you and valuable to your audience can seem less daunting than the quest for the holy grail. The most important thing to remember about social media is that you don’t dictate the content that you share; your audience does. So while you may think it’s a cool idea to share links to your products every day, your audience may not.

1. Shopping gets Social

We typically recommend Social Media Marketing for branding, audience engagement, and awareness campaigns. Well, we can now tack on product sales to that list with the launch of product-focused ad formats. Between buyable pins, Facebook product ads, and the much awaited launch of Instagram ads, social media is quickly evolving into a modern day bazaar.

2. New ad platforms

Buyable pins and Instagram ads have monetized these juicy, user-engaged platforms that advertisers have long- awaited sinking their teeth into thereby revolutionizing the way we shop and share. Both of these platforms have pushed advertisers to develop creative that is bold and enticing, a departure from the sterilized, multipurpose display ads of yore. This shift towards visually appealing creative that captures what is awesome about a company or product makes marketing even more fun.

3. Tweets Indexing

In 2015 we’ve seen fresh, unique content prevail in the oversaturated, myopic, content heavy boom-and-bust strategy vaguely known as “The New SEO.” With Tweets indexing in a matter of minutes, it’s imperative to consider each one of those 140 characters your company’s Twitter account is syndicating.

Website Design

At Exults, we’ve seen a lot of website design trends come and go in our 10 year run. 2015 has been a standout for us because the trends we’ve seen take off this year have revolutionized our process and changed the way we see and think about design.

1. Responsive Design

Earlier on in this post we discussed responsive design as it pertains to SEO. Well, it’s also a big change in the way we build websites. It’s not too often we say this, but responsive design has changed the way we do everything. Because each element present on our custom sites needs to scale down (and look good doing so), we have changed our design process. With each design decision we make, we have to think about how it will look on every common screen size a user could be viewing it from.

2. HTML5 display ads

While animated ads aren’t new, the ability to upload your own custom animated display ads (rather than using Google’s ad builder tool) is. 2015 has been the year of added “oomph” and we’re using HTML5 in more ads than ever to give our clients an extra leg-up on the busy, ad-filled pages of the display network. With the very recent launch of Interactive Display ads beta, custom motion graphics and frame by frame animation are going to continue their rise in 2016.

3. The End of Stock (photos)

More people, businesses, and organizations have websites than ever before. Market saturation always results in some level of duplication- and stock photos are a prime example of that. We’ve all seen those overused stock photos that seem to follow you around like creepy eyes in a Haunted Mansion painting. That’s why we’ve started using unique photos on our design projects as often as we can. If you’re going to boast about your fleet, show it! Have an awesome team? Let your customers get to know them. Is your office an inspiring place? Put that imagery on your website. By incorporating real elements onto the intangible web, you’re creating a more organic experience for potential customers.

And (deep breath) that’s it! The most noteworthy trends in our industry for 2015, compiled in listicle format for easy reading. We’ll see you on the flip-side, 2016!

The post Internet Marketing Trends: 2023 in Review appeared first on Exults Digital Marketing Agency.

Mobile devices are the new convenience standard- surpassing tablets and laptops.  They’re easy to carry, full featured, and always connected. As the saying goes, “due to overwhelming demand…” your search results will now be even more refined on a mobile device.

Starting April 21^st websites that are mobile friendly will be clearly labeled if you are browsing from a mobile device. Additionally, mobile- friendliness will be a ranking signal thus giving websites that mobile compatible ranking priority to mobile visitors.

If you’re concerned about potential limitations on your site, you can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test resource. The tool will outline any inconsistencies or load issues along with showing you what your site looks like on a standard mobile browser.

Check out how our own site did:

To address this new shift, we recommend either developing a dedicated mobile site, or converting your existing site to a responsive format. There are advantages to both, and ultimately the most effective method will depend on your needs.

A dedicated mobile site is best for local businesses that offer several products or services, or are looking to drive foot traffic. A mobile site should be a condensed version of your main site and have the pertinent information potential customers would need quickly. Examples of this could include contact details, address, pricing information, or product offerings.

Responsive design involves re-coding your existing website to actively respond and adjust to screens of all different sizes. This format works for businesses that provide products or services that require more information or involve a more in depth buying cycle. In this case, even if on a mobile device, users will be looking for information to support their decision.

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