You’ve seen terrible websites, you’ve heard cheesy music load and play the second you hit a site, you’ve no doubt seen mouse trails streaming from your every move as well.
With so much competition on the Internet today, it’s imperative that your web design stands apart and introduces your brand to the digital world in an amazing way, if yours doesn’t, your competitors will. Today’s web design is all about clean, simple and easy to use.
- Keep It Clean.
White space can be your friend AND the friend of your website visitors. Many designers feel the need to occupy EVERY bit of pixel real estate on a monitor, but the reality is this: if your website feels cluttered and busy, your visitor could be hitting the back button and visiting your competitors. - Show Me The Way.
You want website visitors to engage you in some way, right? Make it easy for them to get to the ‘promised land’ by keeping your website navigation clean and simple. Many folks want to make sure that every single page is listed in the top navigation, but that can confuse and clutter, resulting in a frustrated site visitor. - Font Styles.
Let’s face it. Arial and Times New Roman can get boring. Designers used to have their hands tied with only a few select font styles, but these days, the options are nearly endless. Google offers a nice array of stylish fonts as does Adobe that you incorporate into your design. - Quick On The Draw.
If your website takes 84 seconds to load because of those heavy banner graphics, you are probably frustrating your website visitors as well as frustrating search engines as they try to crawl and index your website. Be certain to optimize your banner images, your videos, your java files and your CSS files to optimize the user experience. A quick loading website is a beautiful thing. - Color Me Bad.
We’ve seen websites that incorporate every color of the rainbow. This is NOT a best practice. Select a few colors that compliment your brand and stick to them. Let your natural photos, product images or employee headshots bring in rich colors. - Engage.
Your website should offer every opportunity to engage. Social media channels offer API’s designed to get your website visitors involved in a conversation and allow your visitors to follow or carry on the conversation once they leave your site. - The Perfect Form.
Contact forms can be challenging to design and not everyone wants to fill out 22 fields to simply ask you a question about your products or services. Keep your form fields to a minimum and make it stupid simple for your prospects to use. If you must use captcha, be certain that it is actually viewable by the end user. Think clean, simple and minimal. - Click. Click. Bang.
If your website sells products and features an online store, be certain that you minimize the amount of clicks it takes to actually sell a product. The general rule of thumb is 3 clicks to a sale, so as you are designing your interface, keep it simple and clean. - Ring Bling.
Not every one of your website visitors wants to fill out a contact form. Sure, you’ve designed a beautiful, simple and easy to use form, but some prospects need to hear your warm voice on the other end before they buy. Be certain to add your phone number in an easy to find, consistent place on your website. Don’t make your visitors hunt and peck for it. - Lock It Up.
Is your website secure? Site visitors need to feel safe. For an extra 60-80 dollars a year, you can install a security certificate designed to keep your web site visitors information safe and secure. Google is also favoring websites in their index that offer website visitors a warm and fuzzy, safe and secure area.
If your brand would like a second pair of eyes on your website, feel free to reach out to us for a second opinion. We’d be glad to review and give you some pointers to make your website design remarkable.
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