You may think that website design is something you only need to think about when you’re creating your company’s website for the first time. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Best practices for website design change all the time, so you should be continually testing and evaluating your site for the best user experience possible. Read on to learn what your website should look like and, more important, what it shouldn’t.

Can You See Me Now?

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve tried to go to a website on my phone only to find that I either come to just a website that is a company name or one where I have to expand the screen by 300 percent just to see product information or to click on one of the sections to make a purchase. Aggravating, to say the least. Don’t be that company. Make sure your website layout is designed to be mobile-friendly so your potential customers won’t choose your competitor for an easier experience. You also reap the SEO rewards that come with having a mobile-friendly website as more people are now viewing the web on their mobile devices rather than from their desktops—and that number is rising all the time. According to data released by StatCounter, 51.3 percent of global web visits now come from mobile devices compared with 48.7 percent of visits from traditional computing platforms.

Color Your World

Take a look at your website and think about how it makes you feel. Yes, really. The colors on a website can affect how a person feels, and can drive them to make a purchase or flee. Kissmetrics found that blue is used the most often in website design because it makes people feel both comfortable and confident about the company, while orange (despite being the most loathed color by both men and women) is considered a “fun” color and is more often used on sports websites. Think about it: If you went to a website and found jolting colors of black, hot pink and neon green graphics all over—and it wasn’t for an ’80s cover band—you’d be a little concerned about the professional level of the company, and rightly so.

Interesting Content Counts

To be a website that people visit again and again, you need to constantly refresh your content and add new content. This also helps to establish yourself as a thought leader, as long as the content is educational and informative, as opposed to just including links to Buzzfeed quizzes (not that there’s anything wrong with those) and the like. Include an assortment of content (both gated and ungated) on your website, from videos to infographics and product data sheets to checklists. Need more content? Take your current content and repurpose it.

What’s the Next Step?

While you’re A/B split testing your website design, which you should do often, make sure you have people who aren’t on your website every day take a look at it. This way, you’ll learn if your website is easy to navigate and if a person can figure out how to quickly make a purchase or get information from your site without getting frustrated. A user experience that may seem common sense to the person who designed the website may not make any sense at all to the actual user. So, test, test, test.

Need help creating more content for your site or designing a landing page that converts? PartnerDemand can help! Contact us to get started today.