Website design is a broad subject area, with many directions and styles you can adopt for your website. You can go with the minimalistic style to the more classy design, from something sleeker to the modern and even vibrant site setup.
While you want to go with a site design that expresses your personality, brand identity and line of work, there are a number of things you should be cognizant of.
When a website is well designed, it feeds seamlessly into its functionality and experience, while making it possible for visitors to get the gist of it at first glance. Below you will find five simple yet effective website design tips that you can, or rather, should be using right now.
Also read: How to Get the Best SEO for Your Website
1. Choose the Right Colours
It’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with what constitutes good composition, as it can help in your colour palette selection. You want to use powerful colours, ones that speak to your viewers.
You’ll find that each colour has its emotional connotation. If you have a brand that is both energetic and passionate, then you should go with reds, rather than a blue. Aside from choosing the correct colours for your brand and website, you also need to use them effectively. There are many techniques you can deploy, such as contrasting these colours off one another.
Make Your Website Content Easy To Read
Readability is essentially a measurement that determines how easy or difficult it is to recognise words, phrases and sentences on your site. When you have a website with high readability, it means end users will be able to easily scan through it. This makes it almost effortless for users to take in all your information.
Making your website highly readable is not too difficult providing you know the rules to abide by.
Contrast is important: You need to get the right balance between the colour of your text and the colour of your background, as well as for accessibility. While it’s likely you’ll go with a colour scheme that reflects the colours of your brand, it’s also very important that there is adequate contrast between all these different elements.
To do this effectively, there are online tools that you can use, such as Contrast Checker. So I suggest you check that out.
Limit your font usage: You don’t want to use any more than three different font styles on your entire website. There may be some unique projects which will require you to use several different font faces, but ultimately, having too many font styles on the page can make things appear cluttered. And also distracts the visitor from the brand identity of your site.
3. Streamline Navigation
The navigation is essentially its functionality. What it can do. Navigation should always be at the top of the pile whenever the topic of functionality is raised, as it forms the backbone of every website.
Everyone ultimately will adopt their unique method of browsing through a website. The best-designed websites have a navigation that is tailored to the wants and needs of the user. So that it feels intuitive, making the visitor have to think less, to move around the site.
But that can be quite difficult. As you have to look at your website in its entirety, looking at its organisation. Consider which content is given its page, which content is added to another page, and what is featured on your sites main menu. These are things you need to figure out, before you start to actually design the website.
From that point, you can start to create your website, with consideration to ease of use, for your end users.
4. Consider Scrolling Over Clicking
So, if you’re unable to condense your information using accordions and/or sliders, what are your options? Well, the short answer, is to just put everything on a single long page. This page also includes things you’d otherwise tuck away.
There have been numerous case studies on this topic that prove its effectiveness. There are tests which entailed taking a small simple sales page, and then comparing it with one that was 20 times larger.
By making their sales page larger, they were able to boost conversions by 30 per cent. Which is very significant.
The reality is, users prefer to scroll than to click on things. Therefore, if your pages contain a lot of data, forcing you to partition it across many pages, maybe it’s time you considered putting everything on a single page.
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5. Use People in Pictures
Besides using these pictures to focus user attention, including people in images on your site is an excellent idea. Humans are always seeking connection, through other people. It’s for this reason you always want to have an about us page on your site.
There are many case studies that have proven this theory true. These studies showed an ability to increase conversions by over 100+ percent, simply by changing a text-based landing page into one that consisted mainly of large photos and images.
Very simple, yet so effective. However, this can all be easily negated, when the website designer uses stock photos. Studies have shown that the average individual is highly adept at recognising generic images, which then turns them off.
It’s for this reason I recommend, in the event that you want to use images, that you use ones that are real. Include pictures of your customers and staff. Just avoid stock pictures at all cost.
6. Make It Accessible
Remember, a large number of people that visit your website, will not have the fastest PC or the latest broadband connection. For this reason, you want to ensure the coding of your site is as simple as possible. Without compromising on site design and architecture of course.
When a visitor arrives on your page, you want that user, irrespective of their platform, to get the best possible experience. You do not want your site to cause an issue on your potential client’s website, as you can be sure that individual will not be coming back.
Additionally, they may refrain from recommending your site to others – which is an effective method of traffic generation.
AUTHOR BIO
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk