How Website Design Can Make or Break Your Online Success
We have all heard the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”, well unfortunately for the digital space 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive (source: Adobe). You may ask yourself why is there a rush to judge? Well, the answer is, you don’t need to spend time with a difficult website when there are a million more out there. So here are some tips and reasons why the design of a website is so important.
Thinking about Overall design
According to the Adobe State of The Content Report (link), a test was conducted where consumers had 15 minutes to view a website, and it showed that 66% preferred a beautifully designed website than something straight to the point.
Basic Web Design guidelines
Leaving white space between elements will make your website look elegant and less cluttered. This will help ensure that each text or picture has its space to shine, grabbing the attention of the user without distraction.
When it comes to color scheme, having contrasting colors is a great way to start. It allows for the eyes to focus on the text on a website, with little to no effort.
Have consistent branding throughout the website with your brand logo on display adds professionalism. This doesn't mean to plaster your logo on every inch of your website, either the top right or left corner will be good.
This seems like a funny suggestion but its effective: psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman stated that the more options that are given, the more time it takes to process those choices, and in the end, can overwhelm people. You don't want your customers feeling overwhelmed, you want immediate action, whether it’s to give their information or purchase an item from your website.
Content is crucial
A website is a graphic media, and as so it has to display a compelling design. In this direction, the excess of text can easily ruin a beautiful design, minimizing the impact of well-crafted graphics and images.
When a user first visits your website, one of the ways they probably discovered its existence is through search engines, using words and phrases that relate to your business. Using the proper keywords in your content will help maximize your website’s performance when it comes to search engines. However, don’t get too crazy, remember you can’t just use keywords without context; it has to make sense and provide value.
It is important that once a user accesses your website the content must be relevant to what it is they were looking for, this is called “providing value to the consumer”. Value is important to a website because no one wants to be on a page about electronics when the search was for a beach vacation.
A website’s value will translate to users staying and exploring your website. This, in turn, will lower your bounce rates (consumers leaving immediately after loading the landing page). Bounce rate is something to think about because it can negatively affect your ranking on search engines.
Navigation & Sitemap
A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.
A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page. (Source: Google).
