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Users interact with businesses online by visiting their website. Websites allow you to convey what your business is about to users, it shows that you exist in the market and probes customers to make a purchase. As a result, your website needs to have an amazing and intuitive web design to keep the users interested in your brand, products, and/or services.
Web design plays an important role in engaging users, creating brand awareness. It influences the impression you leave on your customers and how they perceive your brand. If your web design is good, it adds to your credibility and gives the customer an idea as to how they will be treated by the company.
If the website design looks unappealing, users will be quick to abandon the website and move on to another. The design also helps enhance the SEO value of your website by making the pages readable for web crawlers. By getting in touch with a Creative Agency Birmingham, their experts may be able to help give you the inspiration you need to build a successful website.
In the meantime, here are the 10 Web Design Do’s and Don’ts Small businesses need to follow:
Do:
Give Importance to Navigation
Navigation is the only way your user interacts with the website and it needs to be easy-to-use. To help your customer find what they needed from your website it is crucial to have a simple navigation system. Your users must only be three clicks away from what they were searching for. Use this three-click rule while designing your website, to ensure that your customer can find solutions without having to click on multiple pages. Add clear navigation options on the top -level as well as the footer of your landing page, so that your users can find important details without confusion.
Highlight Useful Information
No user reads all the content displayed on the website. Instead, viewers tend to glance at the page and skim through the content. Highlighting your main features and basic details should be prioritized as this step can help users find useful content by simply scanning your web pages. A good web design follows a visual hierarchy wherein important information that ticks the users is placed before all the other elements.
Make your Website Responsive
Responsiveness is key for a good web design. Creating a mobile-friendly website will ensure that your website is accessible and indexed by Google. User experience relies on the ability of your web design to provide a consistent experience to the users across all devices. Make sure all the website elements adjust to different screen sizes and test your website by opening it on desktop, mobiles, and tablets before launching it.
Add Call to Actions on Every Page
Do you need your customers to create a profile on your website? Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter or simply fill out a contact form? The best way to get your users to interact with your company website and take some action is to give them constant reminders through CTAs. You can add pop-ups on or mention the CTA in the middle of the content for every web page.
Make the colors and Fonts Easy on the Eye
Colors and fonts need to look natural and should not strain the user’s eyes. Add contrasting colors and an easy to read font to display the content on your website. Use different colors to mark visited and unvisited links to make it easier for the customer to know which page they next to visit next without getting confused or visiting the same pages on a loop.
Don’t:
Add Poorly Formatted Text
Content is king and there is no issue with adding a lot of text to the website. Quality content is always appreciated by web browsers. However, too much text can be problematic if is not well-formatted. Breaking up the content into bite-sized paragraphs with not more than 1-4 lines, creating a hierarchy of content by highlighting headings, subheadings and adding bullet points, and limiting the content column width makes your website look simple and clean. You can also add images for long pages, to give your users a better reading experience.
Make Users Wait
Reducing the loading time automatically enhances the user experience as customers are getting more and more impatient. A recent study by Blue Corona revealed that 47% of users expect a website to load in two seconds or less. This is a clear indication that if your website takes a lot of time to load, your viewers might abandon the site out of frustration. To optimize the page loading speed, you need to avoid using .png images and understand your current website performance with the help of tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights.
Prioritize Aesthetics over Usability
Your website design should be the last thing preventing your user from consuming the on-screen content. Avoid adding auto-play videos or background music to your websites as unexpected stimuli can be irritating for visitors. If you wish to incorporate audio-visual elements on your website, give your users the choice to play the video or soundtrack.
Use Different Fonts
Adding different fonts to make your website look unique, might sound like a good idea but it is not. Different writing styles can make your website look messy. Variations and unconventional fonts can be distracting for users. The best practice is to keep your font style simple. Try to only use three different font styles and sizes for your website and avoid going above this number.
Let Promotions Bombard the Landing page
The main content or the message conveyed by your website can be overshadowed if you display too many ads on your landing page. These promotions make it difficult for users to accomplish their goals. Displaying too many ads may all be competing with your content to get the readers’ attention and this sensory load will eventually lead to an increase in your bounce rates. If you have an e-commerce website, make sure you only display promotions that do not distract the users from the products they were searching for.
While there are many nuances in the industry, the above pointers elaborate on the basic do’s and don’ts for web designing. Small businesses should be extremely careful before launching their websites as their website will influence the company directly in terms of conversions.
