How User Experience and Content Marketing are Affected by Website Design

A website’s design is the face of the business or individual behind it. If it’s a business that’s operating solely online or partly, it’s the digital face that creates the first impression for any new customer.

The design of a website can certainly impact a user’s experience on the site and any content marketing investments you make as a business. A lot of online users have expectations nowadays when it comes to a website’s design and if it’s not up to the standard, then it could hinder a lot of your business efforts.

To what extent do website design impact user experience and content marketing? In this guide, you’ll learn how a lackluster website design can damage your content marketing efforts and turn away potential leads that would otherwise convert into customers. You’ll also get a few helpful tips on how to improve your web design to drive further growth and success for your business.

How is UX affected by website design?

User experience plays a major role in the success of any business, so something like your website design shouldn’t be compromising the performance that it has. With that being said, what are some of the ways that UX can be affected by web design?

The presentation

The way you present yourself online is important, especially when it comes to your website. A polished presentation where every element of your design works is going to provide the user with a better first impression of your brand or manages the expectations of your existing customers.

A bad design can lead to a higher bounce rate

When you’re looking at utilizing UX research tools, you’ll look at everything related to improving the user’s experience. With a bad design, you’re more likely to contribute to the bounce rate of your web pages.

The bounce rate is how long a user stays on the page before clicking off the site completely. If you’ve got a high bounce rate, then the website’s design might be a contributing factor to the problem.

Functionality and responsiveness

Apart from a well-presented design, the functionality and responsiveness of the site is also a major contributor. There’s nothing worse than a web page not working and leading to a ‘404 error page’.

Talking of broken links, 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience. Once a user has experienced a lack of functionality, then they are most likely to avoid visiting your site again.

Trust and communication with users

Building trust with your users is an important one and with the right design elements in place, not only does it create a seamless visual appearance, but it also builds trust. With a good design, the user is more likely to buy something from the site because a good-looking website is going to get a better reaction than one that’s outdated or basic.

How is content marketing affected by website design?

Content marketing is one that can be affected by website design and with a lot of marketing efforts, it can cost your business some serious cash. However, it’s money that can be well spent, with conversion rates nearly 6x higher for those that adopt the use of content marketing.

Makes content more accessible

A website’s content can be made a lot more engaging when all of your audience can get involved. Unfortunately, not every website or social media platform has been optimized to cater to those with accessibility needs.

From simple changes such as font size and captioning, it can make a sizeable difference to how well your content marketing is received, as well as it being a better user experience for all.

It’s handy to have so many more tools in place to improve website accessibility and that of your content too. From how to transcribe a YouTube video with Happy Scribe to adding voiceovers, it’s all useful in providing a more inclusive experience.

As a business, it’s always good publicity if you’re seen to be doing more within the accessibility community. With the internet being the source of all information, the topic of accessibility is only going to be more critical and necessary to consider as a brand online.

Interest or appeal of the content

The content you post has to be meaningful to the user. However, if it’s not presented in the right manner, then even the best quality content is at risk of being dismissed. With a lot of your content likely aimed at selling and promoting products, it’s important that your website design is adapted to showcase your content in the best possible way.

Also, make sure that your blog articles are written with user intent in mind. The more your articles are user-friendly and attention-grabbing, the better you can grow your blog content.

There’s nothing worse than investing your money into well-written content and high production value media content, for it to just fall at the final hurdle when placed onto your site. Any landing page that your users land on needs to be optimized fully in terms of its design and functionality to help readers engage with the content that they’re being presented with.

Readability

Simple errors when it comes to website design can severely impact the readability of content. Font, for example, is one that certainly affects the readability of your website’s content. It’s not just something that can be a problem for the visually impaired but even for those that have 20/20 vision.

A study found that by simply changing to a 14px Georgia font instead of the default Arial 12px, the website in question’s average bounce rate decreased from 88.0% to 80.9%.

Despite having all of the design tools at their fingertips, businesses can still be prone to making the mistake of using color that clashes with certain fonts or other content elements on the page.

Improves user engagement

User engagement is crucial when it comes to content marketing. You may end up producing some fantastic content that’s valuable and useful to users but the wrong web design can cause disinterest in the content itself and that reduces overall engagement.

A high engagement is going to hopefully lead to more conversions, whether that’s leads converting to customers or encouraging users to sign up for your website’s newsletter.

Three tips to help improve your web design for UX and content marketing

How do you improve your web design in order to enhance any UX and content marketing you contribute to the company’s online domain? Hopefully, with the below tips, you’ll be able to leverage your website design for the better in 2024 and beyond.

With 57% of internet users not recommending a business due to a poor web design, it’s an element of your branding that you can’t afford to ignore.

1. Create a layout that the user will enjoy exploring.

There are lots of website designs out there that you could purchase and upload to your domain very easily. These are cheap and affordable, often being used for individuals starting a blog for example, or starting up a new business.

However, once established and having more budget to allocate to your web design, it’s important to invest in one that’s tailored to your brand and that’s interesting to look at. With that being said, consider the layout of your design and use graphics and positioning of elements to encourage your users to look further than just the landing page they arrived on. You can add your own brand colors or try out different combinations that would match your theme or landing page.

2. Add detail to your navigation menu.

A navigation menu should be on your website design and if it isn’t, then you’re certainly causing an impact on the user’s experience. How do you expect them to find the content you put on there if there’s no direct way of getting to it?

A descriptive and detailed navigation menu is important, especially if there are many areas to your site. A search bar can be helpful to have but if the user is coming to the site for the first time and has no in-depth knowledge of what your business provides, then it’s somewhat ineffective for those users.

3. Optimize your web design for mobile users.

It’s been found recently that the number of unique mobile internet users stood at 4.32 billion, meaning over 90% of the global internet population uses a mobile device to go online in 2021. Therefore, there’s a crucial need for a responsive website design that can adjust easily to the device the user is accessing the site. Whether that’s a desktop, a tablet, or more importantly a mobile phone.

By creating a better browsing experience on mobile, Google, and other search engines your site appears on, will recognize the value of your website. Thus, bumping your ranking and helping you climb the search pages to the top.

In general, your website design should impact how well your website is optimized. This can also be in relation to the speed of your site and how quickly pages and elements of the page load. Test your site’s speed to check that it’s still loading as quickly as it should be.

Strengthen your website design to benefit UX and content marketing

Imagine your user experience, content marketing, and website design being best friends. They all rely on one another to be the best version of themselves.

Without one pulling their own weight, it can compromise the others. With that being said, pay particular attention to how well your website design performs and how that benefits both the UX and content marketing efforts of your business.

Note: This informative post has been written with the collaboration of some talented people from the .