Web Design for Digital Marketing

Web Design for Digital Marketing
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Web Design for Digital Marketing
Global leaders in retail and every other business sector seem to have shifted their operation to online platforms. Internet technologies of the contemporary era, coupled with other arising issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic that have crippled the supply chain, have accelerated the need to have virtually everything available on online platforms. With the right amount of technical capabilities or even using some customizable frameworks available today, one can build a simple e-commerce website in few steps. Having a website running is one thing, but driving traffic to the website and keeping the visitors longer than necessary on the online platform is one major hurdle that all e-commerce sites are battling. Mastering the web design techniques and leveraging other digital marketing technologies enable websites to stay ahead of their competitors on online platforms. For example, Walmart.com, a giant in the retail industry and an online option for the Walmart brick and motor stores, has outsmarted its competitors in e-commerce, including Amazon.
The basic features of a well-designed website have all been adhered to within Walmart.com. Mobile responsiveness, fast-loading, embedding social media pages, leveraging analytic capabilities, security and privacy, SEO savvy, embedded CMS, and most importantly, the ability to keep it simple are some of the best practices in web design, most of which have been satisfied by Walmart.com (Pinsky, 2018). The need to keep the web pages simple and having the ability to evoke customer intuitions are also vital in enhancing overall website attractiveness, conversion rates, and ultimately selling the products. Walmart.com has lots of its landing pages covered with white spaces, and the colors used are kept to a minimum, making the website clean and causing less distraction to the customer while keeping the focus on the product. The large search bar at the top of the page plus the little icons for creating an account, a drop-down activated while on hover as opposed to clicking, and cart icon make the website more organized and easier to navigate. Although Walmart’s load time is not as fast as its major competitor, Amazon.com, estimated at three seconds to full load as opposed to 1.4 seconds for Amazon, the custom fonts and appealing graphics that is often attributed to slow loading make the site more appealing and offset the shortcomings of load time (Akulov, 2018).
Aside from the simplicity, organization, and ease of use with Walmart’s e-commerce platform, the company has also leveraged search algorithms as well as machine learning techniques to ensure relevance with customer searches. Similar to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques often deployed by major search engines like Google and Bing, Walmart....