Top 5 Web Design tips to increase Web Traffic

Web design plays a vital role in how well a website ranks in search results on Google and other search engines. As a result, great Web design can create a dramatic effect on your business and how you make money online.

By implementing a few design improvements that leverage the latest Web technologies like CSS3, responsive Web design for mobile support, HTML5, and more you can derive potentially large gains for very little effort. However, if you are completely allergic to CSS and HTML, then you might want to get in touch with your Web designer and get them to make these design changes.

1. Supersede background images with CSS3 background gradients

Is your website still using background images? Images are large and chew the bandwidth slowing down your website. In almost all cases, background images can be replaced with modern looking, attractive, and lightweight CSS3 gradients. Head over to one of my favorite Web design tools, Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator. This will allow you to create cross-platform CSS using a graphical interface. All you need to do is copy and paste the new CSS code into your own style-sheets, and away you go.

2. Employ Images with text

Does your website use an image to display the site title? Do you use images to display written information? Not only are images large and unwieldy, but they also hide valuable SEO information from Google and other search engines. Using an image as header text is fine for a human, but not for the search engines because they can’t “read” images that contains important SEO keywords and phrases, and you’ll soon notice page rank improvements in the SERP.

3. Implement responsive Web design

Does your website support mobile devices? This is arguably the most important Web design update that all bloggers and businesses will have to do in the near future. Mobile access to the Internet will soon outpace PCs. This makes mobile Web design an imperative. There are several different methods you can use to implement responsive Web design for mobile support.

4. Replace JavaScript with CSS3 transitions

As a general rule, avoid using JavaScript if you can – it can hide important content from search engines, slow down your site, degrade badly, and generally lead to slow the user's browsing experiences.

But, JavaScript has been used to add cool, professional effects to websites for so long that many people don’t even consider what’s out there. It’s a pity because there are pretty amazing, super fast, super lightweight Web designs possible with CSS3 and HTML5.

5. Speed up your Website

Google takes page speed and performance seriously, and so should you. There are three ways you can speed up a Webpage:

1. Reduce the amount of time it takes to build a page on the server
2. Reduce the amount of data transferred from the server to the browser
3. Simplify the DOM (Document Object Model)

1. If you are using a PHP based CMS like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla you might benefit from installing something like APC (Alternative PHP Cache) on your web-server that can help to speed up the actual PHP processing behind the scenes.

You might also look at ways to simplify your website so that there is less PHP or database queries to process. Caching is an important part of reducing server processing loads, and every website should utilize at least some sort of caching to speed things up.

2. You can reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred from the server to the browser using a number of techniques like:

• Compression, or gzipped transfer
• Reduce images
• Optimize images

3. Designers love using tools to design Web pages. Unfortunately, many of these tools don’t create HTML in a very efficient way. Often there are unnecessary containers, tables, boxes, etc.

Those are my top design tips to help drive traffic to your business website. What Web design tricks do you use to improve your page rankings and Web traffic? Do you think that Web design has helped your business succeed online?