How to make your website stand out from the competitors?

If you want to be a leader in your market niche, you should make it a goal not only to keep pace with your competitors but stand out from them.

So since mobile-friendliness and high security are the obvious must-haves for your website, today we will focus on those aspects that will make your website distinctive from your competitors’ sites in the eyes of Internet users.

Tips to make your website stand out on the web

• Stand out with an original company logo

The first thing people notice when they get acquainted with your company and brand is your logo. A logo is important for business — it’s like a calling card. Use creativity when combining colors and fonts. Use symbolism and common associations. Play on a similarity of letters and shapes of objects related to your business sphere. Make it easy to guess what products and services you offer from your logo. Try not to make your logo look like somebody else's logo that already exists to avoid confusion.

• Stand out with unique and fresh content

High-quality, useful and original content is appreciated by both users and search engines and makes you stand out as a reliable source. Avoid plagiarism. Provide site visitors with informative and interesting insights on your products, services, and industry trends. Teach them and entertain them.

Make content reflect your company culture and clients’ personalities. Treat users as individuals rather than mere consumers. Personalize your site’s content and show what corresponds to the interest of every user. It is equally important to keep your website content fresh by constantly updating it and adding something new.

• Stand out with stunning graphics and custom photos

Since people precept visual information more quickly than text, which needs more time and effort to be preceded by the human brain, use images to accompany your textual content. Visual stimuli also contribute to users’ connection with your site and brand on an emotional level and lead to better conversion rates.

A simplified and streamlined flat design is now the trend. Create catchy and memorable web design elements in your brand colors. If you, for example, sell clothes or deliver food through your website, then you can’t dispense with natural-looking objects. For this purpose, use custom-made photos instead of stock photography. They will make your website original, distinctive, and stand out from the other websites that use the same photos from the same stock sets that many others use.

• Stand out with unusual background but be careful

The majority of sites on the web, as well as the majority of books, have white backgrounds. That’s why choosing any other color will make you stand out. However, it’s important not to lose usability when chasing sophistication. Choosing black for a site’s background will be advantageous if visual content prevails, like on photo galleries. If textual information prevails in the foreground like on a blog post page, then dark fonts on light shades of colors will be less tiring and harmful for users’ sight than vice versa.

Also, as a background, you can use images or patterns instead of plain color, but here it's important to avoid becoming an eyesore, as in the example below, so the background doesn’t distract from concentrating on the content itself.

• Stand out with a cheerful 404 error page

Everyone makes mistakes. However, the ability to keep people satisfied when showing disappointing error messages to them is a true mastery, which will bear fruits. Look at these examples of creative 404 error pages and get inspired for your own. Use a funny or just pleasant image or animation that shows your creativity and corresponds to your site’s general theme and style. Entertain users with a simple, engaging game or quiz.

• Stand out with no annoying requests like CAPTCHA

People usually feel bored when filling out forms. So try to make the registration process as painless as possible for users but nonetheless secured for you. There are lots of ways to stop spam bots from submitting web forms. ReCAPTCHA asks to make just one click instead of typing blurry letters. Although, you can take a step even further in simplifying this process to zero actions for users!

Use the opposite approach where people do not have to confirm they are people, but vice versa: spambots have to disclose themselves. Google has introduced invisible reCAPTCHA with no checkboxes for human users, but challenges that are hard to solve for bots. One other way is using a Honeypot module for Drupal 8 websites, which adds a timestamp and a hidden field, unseen by humans but not by spambots. When bots fill in this field, they are detected and blocked.

• Stand out with a countdown timer

Everyone has pleasant memories from childhood of counting to midnight on New Year. All TV channels display a clock and all citizens of Earth hold their breath monitoring a moving arrow striving to reach the number 12. This countdown brings the feeling that something important is happening, and you don’t want to miss this desirable moment.

Placing a countdown timer on a website will have the same positive effect. When you are planning to launch a renewed site or some campaign, the variables that are changing in real-time will encourage visitors to wait impatiently and be curious about what is going to happen after counting is over or, on the contrary, hurry up to make a purchase before it’s too late. Be it a circular progress bar or a simple countdown shown in Arabic figures, it will also stand out from the sites by arranging its message in a form of unchangeable information. For Drupal sites, a Countdown Timer module will be useful.

We hope this article that complements our list of useful tips to improve your website will help you create an incredible user experience, enhance your brand recognition, establish brand loyalty and make your website stand out. We also can help you get professional Drupal website support if you need to redesign or solve any technical issues.