How Does Web Design Impact Content Marketing? (2024 Guide)

We all know that website design is very important for leaving a good first impression on your potential clients. But, how does web design impact content marketing?

Well, whether you believe it or not, both these two things are interconnected!

A website with good content but a poor web design means all of your content marketing efforts & investment are prone to waste… Sounds harsh, doesn’t it?

Well, think of it this way… You visit a website that uses a small font size of purple color on a green background… Regardless of how good the content is, you wouldn’t even want to read it since it will make your eyes hurt!

Similarly, a website that has poor navigation will make it hard for the visitor to access all of your website’s pages. Say, the visitor got educated and wanted to contact you and become a client… but no “Contact Us” button was to be found!

And the list goes on and on!

On the contrary, a website that uses the ideal color combination for its respective industry and utilizes a user-friendly font size will make the content easy to read!

So, YES, the way your website looks also plays a vital role in your content marketing strategy. That’s why we will look at the different ways a web design can impact your content marketing & what you can do to make your website design content friendly!

But, what is content marketing in the first place?

Content marketing is a technique of publishing relevant and valuable content to attract the target audience. The main objective is to convert the target audience into customers of your products/services by providing value instead of advertising directly. Content marketing has become a central part of the digital buyer’s journey.

For example, a website that sells cars could create a guide on how to buy cars safely on the internet. Now, this guide is actually an indirect attempt to convert the visitor into a buyer of the website by educating them.

Also, any person reading an article like this will be actually interested in buying a car and thus will be the perfect example of the target audience.

In fact, we provide web design services. And a part of our lead generation strategy involves providing content that helps our potential customers, like yourself, find answers to their questions. That’s why you’ll see later that we’ll embed CTAs and buttons in an attempt to do business with you.

However, creating content is just one part of content marketing… Once the content is published, it must be marketed through proper channels as well, such as social media, search engines, and so on.

Again, we do exactly that by going where our audience is most active. We are mostly active on LinkedIn where we educate the audience more about relevant topics…

5 Ways web design impacts content marketing and strategy:

Now that we understand what content marketing is, let’s look at how web design can impact your content strategy:

Accessibility

The first and most important factor that can impact your content strategy is the accessibility of your website. If a visitor can not find the content they want to read quickly, they will simply leave.

And even if they stay on the website in an attempt to find relevant content, it would just lead to a poor user experience!

In addition, one of the major reasons for a high bounce rate is poor accessibility… For example, Time.com (a news website) reduced its bounce rate by 15% after adding continuous scrolling on all of its pages.

So if you are facing the issue of a poor bounce rate and visitors are not staying long enough on your website, then make sure that your website design is accessible!

Content readability

Another factor that should be considered in website design is content readability… This refers to how easy it is to decipher and read the content on your website.

When we talk about content readability from a web design perspective, a lot of factors are involved… Think font size, font color, background color, font family, and so on.

If you miss even one of these, it will significantly reduce the content readability score and will make the users leave your website sooner!

For instance, using a weird combination of text to background color could make the visitor’s eyes hurt (metaphorically). Similarly, using too small or too big of a font size can also affect the content’s readability!

User-friendliness

If your website design is not user-friendly, it can also significantly affect your content marketing strategy. User-friendliness is a very broad principle, though.

But let’s focus on a tighter spectrum for a second… Here are some ways through which a website can be made user-friendly:

• Compatibility on all devices, especially mobile and tablet
• Short loading times ensure that visitors do not have to wait for a long time
• Compatibility with all major browsers including Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera, etc.
• Forms that are easy to use and accessible

Visual Appearance

An extremely decisive factor that can make or break your content marketing is the visual appearance of your website. An all-around rule of thumb is that the visual appearance of your website should match the industry where your website is operating.

A design that is visually unappealing or looks as if it is made in the early 2000s will drive the users away from your website; thus forwarding them to your competition!

As they say, first impression matters; and the first thing a user looks at your website is its visual appearance.

Through the visual appearance, you need to convey confidence and professionalism to the visitor so that they can actually read and trust your content.

Comprehension

Forbes published a paper in 2019 where it explains that up to 91% of internet users prefer visual content. So, remember that when we talk about content, it just doesn’t even mean text; it also includes images & videos!

To improve comprehension, your website design must include visual elements such as images, videos, GIFs, motion graphics, infographics, and so on.

When these things are blended into the written content, it leads to improved comprehension, which ultimately improves traffic and audience engagement.

So, how would you rate the performance of your website compared with your content creation effort? Let us know and we’ll contact you asap with proper insights on your special case!

5 Tips to design a content-friendly website

To ensure that your web design for content marketing is up the speed, follow these tips:

Mobile friendly

Any visitor who lands on your website should be able to read your content despite the device difference!

A visitor that visits your website from a mobile should get an as good experience as they would get from a PC or a big screen device!

The best way to achieve that is to ensure that your web design is mobile-friendly.

These days, no website can even think of ignoring mobile visitors, as 59% of the global traffic comes from mobile. And the number’s just more likely to go higher!

In other words, you’re wasting a lot of gains if you’re not optimizing your website for mobile!

From scaling down the menu to minimizing different elements, ensure that content remains the main focus of your visitors.

In addition, choosing a font size that is appropriate for the mobile screen is also an important factor to remember.

Easy navigation

Websites that rely on content marketing usually have a lot of pages on their website. To make it easy for the visitor, make sure that your website is easy to navigate.

Some of the ways to incorporate easy navigation in your website design include:

• Drop-down menus that include the important categories and links
• The search bar is at a prominent location (preferably above the fold and in the sidebar)
• Adding relevant article links along with their thumbnails at the end of the blog page
• Adding essential links in the footer area

Font family, size & color

As we mentioned earlier, how small, big, good, or ugly your text looks will highly depend on your font choice!

So, probably the first thing you should consider in your web design journey is the font family… If you look the internet up, you will find tons of free & premium options, including Arial, Verdana, Calibri, Futura, etc.

But remember, you can’t use just any font that you like on your website… Instead, the font family should be picked based on the industry of your website!

The next thing is the size of the typography on your website…

Once again, you need to strike a perfect balance to ensure that your text content is neither too small nor too large to read. The last thing you would want is for a visitor to have to take a magnifying glass to read the text on your website!

And last but not least, the color of the font should be easy on the eyes, and must go with the overall theme of the website!

High-converting colors

Whether you believe it or not, colors do play an important role in everything we do, including how web design impacts content marketing!

According to research, the best converting colors from a content marketing perspective are yellow, green, red, and orange. On the contrary, the colors such as purple, brown, dark grey, and black have low conversion rates.

As the main purpose of content marketing is to turn visitors into customers indirectly through your content, you would want them to click on your CTA buttons!

So, by using colors such as yellow, green, red, and orange for your CTA buttons, you can improve the conversion rates of your website.

For example, Amazon.com uses orange color for its “Add to Basket” button, which tells us that colors do play a bigger role!

Add share buttons

Make it easy for the visitors to your website to share content on social media platforms! Basically, all the major websites are utilizing share buttons on their content pages, which is enough of a reason to also incorporate this strategy in your web design!

Now, there are a lot of different ways through which you can add share buttons on your website… Some websites use sliding share buttons that continue to remain visible on the visitor’s screen even if they scroll down. Some other good locations for the share buttons are at the top and at the bottom.

 To sum it up

You can have the best content in the world, but if your website is not optimized to present that content well, no one will be bothered to read it! To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, remember to look at all the factors that can impact your content marketing (mentioned above).

And if you are looking for a website design that can complement your content marketing strategy instead of sabotaging it, contact us and we’ll get back to you with a FREE CONSULTATION!