Web designers have repeatedly emphasized the importance of a user-friendly website. Yet, a lot of businesses fail to implement such a website. The web world has become such that if you don’t have a well-optimized website, you might as well not have a website at all.
With Google focusing on mobile-first experience, a robust website is the first stage of creating a sound online presence. Robust web design these days is much more of a requirement than a status symbol.
The usability, experiences, and content of a website can affect the revenue of a business. If you are neglecting your website, there will be real-world consequences. The companies may not fully realize the extent of damage, but with time, the rankings and number of visitors will be reduced.
The longer you are using bad web design, the more potential clients and revenue you will be losing. In today’s world, the brand that is capable of engaging more clients will win. It takes time to win in Google search engine results page. Every month you are not getting your website optimized, you are lagging behind.
Here are some of the most important ways of improving your website design and winning over the audience to your cause.
1) Create a web design for an overarching objective
What is the primary thing that you want your visitors to do on your website? Make sure your website is designed for that. If you don’t know what exactly you want your target audience to do, you are not ready to make a website.
A well-optimized website makes it abundantly clear what they are about. If you consider Google’s homepage, there have been numerous modifications, optimizations, and additional services. But the core services have not changed. There is a single search entry blank with buttons to activate it and it is surrounded by a lot of white spaces.
A good UX design will drive the visitors towards a clear action. Websites that don’t have an overarching objective, often suffer from an identity crisis. This is why their visitors go through the “paradox of choice” and it becomes frustrating. Thus, it is important to avoid such a scenario.
2) Present your website according to the requirement of the internet
Things have changed in the way people go through the internet these days. Nowadays, people don’t go through a website thoroughly. The pace of information-retrieval has replaced thoroughness. Thus, reading nowadays has become equivalent to scanning with eyes.
According to eye-tracking studies, internet users these days “read” in an F-pattern. We scan the headings, the subheadings, and the opening sentences of the paragraphs. The reason for such an inconsistent reading pattern is we want to compensate for the massive amount of information available.
A smart UX design can compensate such behaviors by frontloading the important and relevant information. The design needs to be such that the headlines and lead sentences are presented along the left margin where the users seek information.
The website users try to avoid long blocks of text to favor short and easy to digest paragraphs with paragraph-breaks. Instead of creating a long and clumsy content, use bullet points or numeric to sort out the points you want to establish.
3) Invest in offering a visual appeal
We already know that visitors will judge a website in less than a second. This has got a lot to do with visuals. For a lot of visitors, if the visuals disappoint, then the website as a whole becomes disappointing.
We are hardwired to be visual creatures. We favor our eyes over any other senses. Our brain is dedicated to process and remember visual information. Considering such cognitive biases, one simply cannot deny that we prefer image-driven websites.
This is why it is important to invest in creating high-quality photography or videography for your website. Also, along with consistent pictures, pay attention to color schemes, icons, negative space, clarity, and hierarchy.
4) Page load speeds
In general, people don’t have that much patience anymore. 40% of your incoming traffic will give up on your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. For most of the search engines, it becomes one of the essential factors for website ranking.
There is a myriad of things that you can do to increase your website speed. For instance, you can enable file compression, optimize the website code, reduce the number of page redirects, and leverage browser caching to reduce the load times.
Another strategy to reduce website load speed is to make sure that the file sizes of your website are not large. Optimize the website design in such a way that the quality of images remains intact and there are no junk files.
5) Mobile optimization
A website that is not optimized for mobiles is not a preferred website for visitors. It will take a long time to load and the text becomes extremely small and unreadable. The images, buttons, and menu options, all become disoriented.
Mobile traffic makes up more than 50% of all the website traffic since 2015. This means, one out of every two people checking your website, is doing it one a smartphone. Now, are you offering them a user-friendly experience?
The difference between smartphones and computers is, smartphones offer to scroll through vertically stacked content. The larger screens like computers allow more variety in navigation. Primarily, there are two forms of designs to ensure a mobile-friendly website, adaptive or responsive.
A responsive design will resize the elements of the website to fit the resolution of the user. An adaptive design is identical to having two different websites, one for the computers and the other for mobiles.
Responsive website design includes less work in web development and more through the range of screen sizes. On the other hand, the adaptive website design has more potential to offer the best experience on mobile.
There are numerous CMS’s like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace offer mobile-responsive themes. If you are using one such CMS’s then make sure that your theme is mobile friendly. The best option is to get in touch with the web design professionals that can get your website optimized.
In conclusion, it needs to be said that your website is the living and breathing representation of your brand. You don’t have to live with bad website design. Let the professional web designers of Skyram Technologies evaluate your website and optimize it in the best way possible.
