How to customize your website but still get good traffic

Designing your website is one of the few tools that you have to stand out from the rest of the competition. But in some cases, websites don’t rely on the retention of constant visitors, which makes “expensive” web design services or efforts meaningless.

If your business is centered around “selling” a specific product to your visitors maybe once or twice, then this article could potentially help you in finding the most optimal design for your website without having to spend a fortune on it.

One-time seller trends

One-time sellers usually rely on the Search Engines to bring them as many customers as possible, therefore the design of their websites is mostly completely oriented on a technicality rather than creativity.

That is why we see so many personal or business blogs follow the same pattern of minimalism. Where the only design aspects are a different choice of colors and the alignment of the content.

Why? Because that’s how the default versions are for WordPress, the most popular CMS for One-time sellers, as it’s easily adaptable for SEO.

These types don’t tend to have any type of advertisements on their sidebars, and if they do, they’re local ones, meaning that it wasn’t ordered by a third party who can dictate the frequency and size.

Therefore, in these cases, we see the ad space take a very small fraction of the user’s viewing field as the webmaster wants them to focus on the written content if it’s a blog, or the CTAs in the center of the page if it’s just a promotional website.

A perfect example of this would be South African Forex brokers listed here, simply due to the outline and the content formation.

Lists are usually very hard to make appealing as they tend to increase in size as time passes and therefore take a large majority of the user’s screen real estate. Because of this, it’s important that the preview of a specific product on the list is appealing as well. And in the case that we brought as an example, that can be seen through icons, star ratings and an interactive link to the full-fledged article.

But what if you don’t rely on written content, but much rather on product listing?

Design patterns for product listing sites

Having a product listing website, or more accurately, an e-commerce store is a bit harder to design, as the patterns need to be very adjusted depending on the products you will be selling.

In most cases, it also relies on things such as color palettes and frames. The background where the products will be listed needs to be a very neutral color, thus focusing the whole attention on the product itself rather than the background.

This is one of the reasons you never see some kind of patterns or pictures on the background content of these products as there’s always a need to focus 100% of the user’s attention on the individual items.

This ensures that the users will either proceed to press on the specific product to acquire more information or to find some new content to consume. Let’s say it simply inspires the user to be a bit more “adventurous”.

How does minimalistic web design help with SEO?

Although these minimalistic web designs that we’ve listed don’t necessarily support a website’s SEO from an immediate standpoint, they do indeed do so through a non-direct standpoint.

A non-direct standpoint is the loading time of the website. The less content there is for the server to load, the less time it is required to load the entire website. And we all know that Google really likes it when the website loads fast no matter where the user may be in the world.

Therefore, the lack of written content that is facilitated through the content patterns of a specific website is compensated through the loading speed.

Best practice cases

The best practice case is to dedicate around 70% of the page to written or visual content in the center while dividing the sides into 15% pieces. This ensures that not only will the website owner be able to emphasize their own products, but also give advertisers the possibility to buy digital real estate on their websites.

Next comes the coloring of the website. It’s usually best to incorporate brand colors in things such as buttons, anchors, heading, and footing. Everything else should carry a neutral color so that, as already mentioned multiple times, the content is emphasized rather than the design itself.

A simple glance through current popular news websites is enough to recognize the trend straight away.