Do you want to know the secret of a great website design? It’s simple to answer but tough to implement. Your website should be easy to understand and provide an excellent user experience. It should match and reflect your brand identity. We should pay more attention to human emotion than to the words. Even if you are running an offline business, having a great website can build your brand and bring more customers.
Let’s have a look at things that make a website great.
Visitor Flow Design
A visitor can’t pay attention to all the things. You should carefully design your website by keeping the user’s perspective in mind. The moment a user lands to your website, his journey starts, continuing until he leaves. During this time, you need to help the user to do things that you want them to do.
It would be best if you note down all the actions that the user can take. Also, write down your website’s goals. For example, an e-commerce website’s goal is to get sales. A blog website may require a subscription; a service website might want a user to fill the contact form for service inquiry, a clinic or saloon might want users to book an appointment. Next, create a pyramid-like hierarchy based on the significance of those actions. A smart designer will put the tip of the pyramid on the homepage so that the user’s eyes see the most important thing first. As per studies, visitors usually scan a website either in ‘F’ or ‘Z’ pattern means they first see the top left section and then top right part, and then they come down. It means that the most important things should go in the top section. Make every effort to minimize the number of pages and clicks required to achieve your goal.
For achieving this, we should emphasize call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Call-to-action buttons are navigation links for visitors where they perform actions to achieve their goals on the website. These buttons or links should stand out, which can be done by smart font and color selection. You should also leave some white space around them so that visitors can easily spot them.
It would help if you also avoided unnecessary and repetitive things because they might distract the user.
Elegant and Clean Homepage
Your home page should have minimum things and should convey the core value that your website provides to a visitor. Users should not need to scroll to understand the purpose of your website. Keep less text because it is a natural human behavior to quickly scan through the site and pick out keywords, images, and links. You should use white space on your homepage so that essential areas highlight naturally like your company logo and call-to-action buttons. Examples of call-to-action buttons are navigation links, Sign-up, Get Started, Try for free, Join us, Placing an order, etc.
It is achievable by selecting an appropriate layout. The layout means you are dividing your screen into horizontal and vertical stripes. Later you can fill your information into the boxes made by the intersection of these strips. The layout helps in organizing content, registering navigation links, and highlighting company name, logo, and call to action buttons. A good layout can lead to a visitor’s focus on the essential parts of the website.
Layout selection also depends on the purpose of the website. For example, a blog site might use a single column layout, whereas an e-commerce website may want to use a grid layout. Web Development Los Angeles provides the latest layouts, themes, and professional help in designing elegant commercial and personal websites.
Uniform Text and Color Selection
Uniformity is the key because it gives familiarity to the visitor. You should decide on the scheme of fixed text font, size, and select a set of colors for your website. Any new component addition should adhere to this scheme.
Text selection
Define fonts which you are going to use throughout your website. Generally, web designers use two fonts, one for standard text and another for call-to-action buttons. It would help if you also decided on the font size in various sections of your website. Font colors should match to overall color scheme.
Color selection
Color selection is essential to generate the right feelings and emotions in your site visitor’s mind. You can use the color wheel for choosing the right color combination.
Contrast colors
Use contrast colors on your website to draw visitor’s attention to essential elements like a call-to-action button or your brand/company name. Colors that are on the opposite side on the color wheel provide high impact and high contrast combination.
Monochromatic Colors
You can also use a monochromatic color scheme where you use three shades of the base color. It is suitable for creating a hierarchy of elements.
Cool and warm colors
The human eye helps the mind to sense and generate different feelings when exposed to different colors. Colors are of two types – cool colors and warm colors. Warm colors give energy and coziness to the mind. Red, yellow, etc. are warm colors. Cool colors provide calmness and peace to the brain, for example, blue, green, etc.
Eye-Catching Visual Content
Keep a large chunk of text on your website is annoying because we hardly read full content for the first time. It would help if you avoided it. Instead of this, you bring your site to life by adding high-quality introductory video, charts, graphs, and animated images that best visualize your business.
We all get attracted to movement as compared to still things. You can include “movement” on your website by using “Parallax Scrolling” to give a 3D effect.
Reduce Site Load Time
No one will like to wait for a website to load for a long time. A good website design should reduce site load time.
Reduce image or video size
While visual content is the backbone of a good website, you should reduce the size of images and videos. For video use streaming, then direct upload.
Content division on multiple pages
If you have lots of data files to show, then better divide among multiple pages to avoid loading at the same time. For example, if you have a gallery of images, then better to put them into different category pages.
We are in an era where user attention time has drastically reduced. You have a few seconds to grab user’s attention and guide them to do things that you intend them to do. The pointers mentioned above will help you to please your visitor’s eyes, and you will be able to increase numbers of customer conversion, repeat visits, and much more. Continuous improvement is the key to a great design.
