Website design is one of the most important factors in
building a successful website. And don’t think for a moment that what passed
for good design even as little as three years ago, is necessarily considered
“good” design now! Things have changed. Website owners need to sit down and
consider whether their site is up to scratch.
What has changed?
A number of things. Firstly, there is a new protocol, HTML5.
This promises to facilitate Responsive Design and integrate functions that once
required browser plug-ins to work. Secondly, low-powered devices have stormed
onto the scene and websites have to be optimised for smartphones and tablets.
If you’re not optimised, you risk missing out on huge segments of the market.
And finally, the profile of those using the web, I call them “we”, have been
evolving to the point where we are no longer impressed by tacky, gimmicky,
“bells and whistles” web pages. We would much rather access what we are looking
for as quickly as possible, without frivolous distractions.
How should my website look?
Right now, the best designs are focusing squarely on user
experience and function. The former relates to intuitive, user-friendly designsthat minimise the amount of time new users spend (read waste) to familiarise
themselves with the layout and navigate around the website effectively. The
latter relates to how the website is managing the ultimate actions that website
owners want their visitors to perform. This could range from purchasing
products to signing up or reading blog entries.
The good news is that both objectives can be serviced by one
basic tenet: simplicity. Below you will find a list of useful ideas to help you
build a website that fulfills precisely what you had originally set out to
achieve.
1. Remove the clutter.
Crowded websites are not conducive to optimal use and are
generally not appreciated by visitors. A lot of extra menu items, links,
graphics and unnecessary web pages might have initially been added with the
noble intention of giving the website greater scope or breadth. But the notion
that people are visiting your site to idle their time away wandering around the
wide array of content and pages is not a good one.
People usually visit websites for very specific reasons, and
those reasons should coincide with the core purposes of your website. Give them
what they want. Don’t distract them.
2. Remove all those colours and fonts.
The general rule for website colours and fonts is only use
two or three. It’s true: you can have hundreds of lovely hues and good-looking
fonts, but they all invariably add lots of confusion and very little value to
your website.
Keep your look clean and simple. Distinguish headings and
subheadings by making them bold and larger, or by changing the background
colour, not by changing the typeface.
3. Get the most important buttons and content to the top.
If you have important “call to action” buttons that you
ultimately want users to click when they visit your website, then try to get as
many as possible of them, without cluttering of course, above the so-called
fold. It’s always a good idea to make your call to action buttons change in
some way when the mouse hovers over them. This helps to make them more
attractive and entice visitors to click on them.
In conclusion, a modern website design is very much more
about focus and quality, and much less about superfluous fluff. We have
recently entered a new age of the internet. An era where users are fully aware
that they can get anything and everything they want on the net. They have come
to your site because you may be able to help them. But they’ll just as quickly
move on to another site that’s down-to-earth and means business, rather than waste
their time on convoluted, messy websites that are trying to demonstrate
something that no one is interested in.
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