Not everyone is well-versed in web design like us, which is why many brands often turn to website design templates in the creation of their site. Though templates often come with all sorts of restrictions, using them does make things easier as you can simply replace the content and visuals accordingly to populate your website design.
The difficulty of using templates for web developers is not the development of it, but choosing the right template for your brand. There’s a lot of planning and understanding key principles of good website design involved so that you can pick the right web design template for you.
It’s by no means an easy feat. As a website design company ourselves, we know the pains and struggles of having to adjust the existing template due to the developments of your brand or existing web design trends.
Blog Section
Blogging may seem like a thing that teenagers used to do back in school, but it has slowly evolved into a very useful and convenient digital marketing tool, specifically Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). For those who’re new to this, SEO is the holy grail of driving website traffic.
When you’re trying to rank a new domain, just having SEO-driven web design is not enough to get you in the first few Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That’s where a blog can come in to bolster your SEO efforts through smart and SEO-focused content writing.
Besides populating your website with fresh content and improving its keyword density, a blog can also serve as a platform for you to share your insights and inside knowledge while upselling your key products/services. If you’ve written a good marketing piece, you could even run some digital marketing ads to support it. In short, a blog is a must-have when you’re choosing your web design template.
Carousel Sliders
There’s so much happening in the world and in the digital space at any point of time. Keeping your website up-to-date with the latest news and events can prove to be difficult if you don’t have a dedicated section for it.
Having a carousel within your website design provides you with a very adaptable tool, which you can use to share various high-quality images and videos that accentuate your brand or emphasise key information or events. You can then create new banners to update your website design on the latest news and events in the carousel.
Be sure to only use banners that fit the overall theme and tone of your website within your carousel. Also, adopt the best practices of using carousel sliders within your website design, such as user control as opposed to autoplay and touch-friendly navigation.
Search Bar
It boggles us that a search bar is not a common element across every website design template. In fact, it should be a must-have for any website in today’s fast-paced society, especially if you want to pay more attention to your user’s experience (UX).
What has search bar got to do with user experience (UX)? A search bar allows your users to reach their desired page by simply finding it, through the entering of the right keywords within the search function. With everyone wanting things faster, a search bar has become a very essential UX feature.
Optimising your website for UX also plays a role in SEO, as Google begins to prioritise users experience in their algorithms of ranking websites. With poor UX, it’s also likely that users will leave your page quickly and increase your website’s bounce rates, which in turn worsens your SEO. So, yes, you need that search bar in your template.
Mobile Responsive Design
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a hundred times. You NEED (not want, NEED) your website design to be mobile-responsive, especially in the current age where there’s a pervasive usage of smartphones across the different generations.
The importance of mobile-responsive cannot be understated, as this feature ensures a seamless transition across different devices and screen dimensions. Regardless of the screen size, the elements within your website design will adjust itself to fit nicely and appear legible for the users.
Responsive web design improves the UI/UX (again!!) of your entire website and saves you the resources of creating a separate site for mobile devices. A bonus of mobile responsive design is it helps with Google’s existing mobile-first ranking algorithms as well. This should narrow down your choices of web design templates a little.
CTA Buttons
Even after you’ve created a beautiful website design out of the template, it needs to be effective in achieving the goals you’ve set for your brand. Aesthetics is important for your website, but you need to have a very important element for its value to your brand: CTA buttons. It’s what drives your business goals, be it sales or leads.
The beauty of design drives good first impressions for your brand while designing CTA buttons is the strategic aspect of it. The position, size, colour, affordability, and copy all play a role in designing a CTA button that converts, which a good UI/UX designer has to determine based on the existing template. Designing a good CTA button allows you to entice your target audience and turns your potential leads into paying customers.
Most importantly, your template should provide you with the option to move, adjust, and add CTA buttons at key positions of your website design. As your design updates over the years, it’s crucial that your web design template can keep up with these updates and provide you with the flexibility to adjust the elements, especially for one as important as the CTA.
Filters
Often more crucial for an e-Commerce website, filters offers users the opportunity to sieve through existing information, data, and results on your website. Non-eCommerce stores can also utilise filters through the abovementioned search bar, allowing users to sieve through their search results and find what they want more quickly.
For sites containing hundreds or thousands of products, having eCommerce filters can enhance the online shopping experience by removing the ‘unwanted’ products for the customers right from the get-go. In a price-competitive arena, a ‘sort by price’ filter is also a handy feature to have.
Make sure that your website design template doesn’t contain a complex filtering system, which requires extensive tagging or labelling of your information for it to work. The last thing you need is having faulty filters that ruin your customers’ user experience.
What You Can Find In A Great Web Design Company
Templates come with their restrictions in terms of the design and features you can have, especially without expertise in web development to tinker with the back-end. If you wish to create something complex and unique to your brand, we highly recommend you approach a web design company in Malaysia like us as opposed to using a template.
With our vast experience and skillset for website design, you can be assured that contacting us will be the best thing you ever did for your brand website-wise. (We do have a couple of other services if you’re into that as well).
