Generally, a website represents business and services in the online space, thereby showcasing their products and services. More so, a website serves as a landing page where products and services of an organization can be viewed and interacted with. To create an impression in the mind of users, you must have a website that captures your brand image as an organization that conforms to the internet age demand. Indeed, your website must appeal to the users, and their experience navigating through your website must be superb.
To have a website designed and developed correctly, you must consult with experienced and expert web developers and designers. Aside from this, consulting with the developers will help you understand what is needed for your website to functional and useful. Before any work is done on your website, designers and developers would have to consider a lot of things which might include the visual appearance of the site, the user experiences the functionality and how well it represents the business and the brand it is developed for. Putting these factors into consideration will allow the developers and designers to have a rethink on which strategy and approach would be best for the project at hand.
More so, creating a great user experience for your website is not only necessary but essential, because it would serve as a navigating guide for the users interacting with your website. Take, for instance, you visit a mall in which goods and other items in the mall are not correctly arranged, and they are placed in a haphazard manner. It would cause confusion, and there would be a lack of interest when shopping in such a mall. The same applies to a website, if it is not correctly designed and sectioned to help the users have a great experience, then the site has lost its importance, and it would experience a bounce rate. The user experience journey starts from the home page while it continues to the individual pages the users are willing to visit.
Focusing On The Users Journey Through Web Design
Sectionalizing Information
Some people, at some point, reefers to the website menu as the information architecture, but it is not right. The website menu and the sectionalization of details represented on the homepage are entirely referred to as the information architecture. Indeed sectionalizing information on the website is the precise arrangement of information on a website in a way that makes some logical sense, which would also be easy for users to comprehend. The purpose of information architecture is to help users navigate through complex information that is presented on a web page without losing interest in the website. When the information is aligned a there is a hierarchy of detailing that is provided, which matches the user’s expectations. However, to be able to design and develop a website that has its information, sectionalized properly doesn’t just come up by chance. Mostly, they come up through meticulous research and testing of the output on the website.
Although there are several ways the user experience is determined and captured by expert web developers and designers, it could be based on opinion polls active participation of selected users in the web design project or working on previous industry reports. Hearing user’s expectations and understanding how some potential users would categorize information to be represented on the internet is a way to determine their needs. Gaining access to the results drawn from the ability of the users to navigate on the test pages properly would also help develop a more tailored fitted solution by the designers and developers.
Pages Navigation
No website is complete without navigation buttons properly set on the web pages. Achieving the usability of any site the navigation section must be placed correctly in the way users would easily locate it and make use of the buttons. No matter how good fancy and well designed and developed a website is, if users cannot easily navigate around it, it is a piece of crap. This is the reason why navigation on any website that is developed should follow some standard principles like;
- Consistency There must be no discrepancies on any of the pages of the websites, which means there must be a uniform navigation system on the entire website.
- Simple and precise The navigation system of any website must be designed in a way that the user must be able to locate any page he/she desires to visit with the fewest mouse click or mouse over as much as possible.
- Clarity There must be clear, concise and concrete details about the navigation system, which should leave the visitors no doubt about it. In other words, it must be self-evident and not confusing in any form.
Web Links And Navigating Options
The links and navigation options are contributing factors that help the navigation system works properly, and it does affect how users interact with the website. There some important rules you must follow when developing and designing the interactive elements on the website.
- Proper Recognition of External and internal links. Users interacting with any website always expect a different function between the internal and external links on any website. It is important that all internal links of a website should open in the same tab while the external links should automatically open a new tab.
- Optimize the colors of Visited links. If the previously visited links do not change in colors, it could cause some confusion making the users visit the same page over and over. More so, developing a website that focuses on the user’s experience has been a way web design Melbourne operates in all their web design projects.
- Check the functionalities of all Links. It could b frustrating when a user is trying to navigate to another page, and it is returning a 404 error. During the development and designing stage, all links must be verified and ensured it directs to the proper destination.
