Are you Creating a Website for yourself or for a client? If so, then you should know that in today’s highly-competitive and robust world wide web, it’s important to ensure that your website is a hit with its potential visitors. Otherwise, you and your client will just be expending efforts and resources for nothing, what with netizens being spoiled for choice no matter what they’re looking for.
Thankfully, there are some tried-and-tested best practices into making a functional and engaging website, one that keeps visitors interested and staying engaged for longer. By simply adhering to these practices, you can turn even the most mundane of websites into a click- and pageview-generating machine. Here are those practices in full, organized in a list for your perusal below.
Adhere to the client’s specifications as much as possible
Whether you’ve hashed out the prospective design of the website with the customer beforehand or you’ve decided to stick to the look you submitted in your website proposal template for your client, it’s always good to keep the client’s wants and desires firmly in mind during the Creating a Website process. Always design your website around the elements or features that they requested for, rather than simply squeezing them in somewhere as an afterthought. By doing so, the website’s overall look and feel will be more cohesive and streamlined, rather than being disjointed and aimless. Your clients will also be very pleased to see that their demands have been met to the letter and then some.
By the same token, make sure that your client understands whether or not the features they’re asking for is actually feasible in your proposed design or if it will actually fit their desired vision for the website. More often than not, clients are very uninformed about the technicalities of Creating a Website, often going by “feel” or simply their sense of aesthetics.
While there’s nothing wrong with that – that’s why they hired you, after all – it’s your responsibility to ensure that the collaborative effort between you and your client is as smooth as possible. Therefore, if there’s any issue with their proposed designs or features, it’s important to let them know beforehand instead of removing or exchanging them at a later stage of the website creation process.
Less will always be more
No matter what kind of website you’re making, one incontrovertible and universal truth applies: it’s always going to be selling something to the visitor. As such, the design of the website needs to be concentrated towards the conversion metrics you’ve set, whether it’s inviting users to buy a product or to sign up to your newsletter.
How do we do that? By keeping the website’s design and user interface as simple as possible. Less is more. Unnecessary elements like animations, sliders, pop-up forms, and banner ads should either be minimized or removed outright. Auto-playing videos and soundtracks should be thrown right out-these do nothing to keep the interest of the visitor and instead irritate them at first sight, making them either close the tab to your website by reflex or mute it entirely. You absolutely do not want the first impression of your client’s website to be one of puzzlement that rapidly goes to annoyance.
Make it personalized
Using stock images and backgrounds for your website is convenient. We get it. It’s much easier and more affordable to simply download stock photos off the internet and feature them on your web page. However, they’re always going to appear fake and staged, especially if the website product or service involves the customer actually visiting the workplace and interacting with the employed staff.
Use authentic, freshly-taken images as much as possible. Hire a photographer or get a friend who’s into the photographing hobby to help out. By doing so, not only will the website look more genuine and personable, but it will also help customers trust the business just a bit more, simply by letting them know that there’s an actual business being run.
Make the content easy to consume
Another universal truth to websites is that they’re mostly going to be content driven. Sure, some sites may have more video or image content than others, but the majority is going to be text. With that in mind, it’s always a good idea to ensure that all text is easy to read and consume. You have to remember that your website is going to be one of many that people will be visiting. If they find that trying to glean information from your website is either painstakingly slow or just plain impossible, they’re going somewhere else. Nothing is stopping them from doing so.
Fixing the content on the website is easy enough. First, use only 2 types of fonts maximum. More than that and you’re filling your webpage with unnecessary visual flotsam that will make it hard for the text to be read. Second, use a large font size, around 16px, for the body text. A larger font will make the text easy to read on both desktop and mobile browsers. Third, use dark-colored text on a white background – although it’s also a good idea to allow your visitors the option to switch to a “night mode”, where the background is dark and the text is white instead. This makes things easier on the eyes by minimizing screen glare.
Finally, keep the text as short and concise as possible. Use elements that allow for quick skimming, such as subheadings, bullet points, blockquotes, and summary paragraphs.
Design your website for fast loading and speedy performance
Your website needs to load as quickly as possible, and there’s no other way around it. In this day and age where even mobile connections are lightning-fast and instant gratification is an unalienable customer desire, having a slow-loading website is a sure way to turn off your site’s visitors. This is especially true with e-commerce websites, where customers want their shopping to be done with only a few clicks and with very little waiting involved. After all, if they were okay with waiting, they’d have done their shopping offline instead!
There are a few things that you can do to guarantee your website is up to the task in this regard. One is to use a reliable web hosting service. Ideally, you should not be sharing a server with anyone else – the hosting service should give you a dedicated server all on your own. Also, compress non-textual content such as images and videos to the minimum possible size, with direct links to higher-resolution versions. Both of these will ensure quick page loading and refreshing, no matter how many visitors are accessing your website.
Ease of navigation should always be a priority
First-time visitors should also be able to navigate your website quickly and easily, in order to get to the content they need faster. Otherwise, they’re just going to be discouraged and go somewhere else for their business. Combating this is easy: first, ensure that the website’s navigation is consistent no matter what page they’re on. This means that if there’s a sidebar or top bar that has links to other major sections in your website, they have to exist in every single page of content. This is important, especially in bigger and more content-intensive websites, as it gives visitors a chance to retrace their steps easily or navigate to another section no matter where they find themselves in. It also serves as an indirect call to action for them to investigate the other sections of your website.
Second is that your content organization should always follow simple and easy-to-understand logic. For example, if you’re a website that sells car parts and one of your top selling points is that all your wares offer original manufacturer warranty, then the warranty information for your products should be on a separate web page titled ‘Warranty Information’, rather than hidden away in a Support FAQ subsection. Better yet, have it displayed at the bottom of every product page, allow customers quick access to warranty information on any product they’re thinking about buying. Having that information easily accessible from the product page reassures them of their purchase.
Conclusion
By keeping these web design best practices in mind during Creating a Website process, you can ensure that your latest web project will not only turn out perfectly, but it’ll also be highly functional and efficient in turning visitors into highly engaged and interested users.
