The look and feel of your website should give the visitor a clear indication of what your company is about, and what they can expect in terms of culture, service quality, and ethos.
While having the right content on your website is pretty important, creating a website that is user-friendly and makes your website visitors feel empowered to navigate the site and find the information or items they are looking for should be of top importance.
I mean what is the point in having a great website that is difficult to use and leaves viewers feeling lost and impatient? Obviously, that is a good enough reason for them to click that little “x” at the top of their browser tab.
So how do you avoid this? Well, here are a few points to consider when designing your website, that will make your visitors feel at home and keep them interested in your offering.
Considerations
1. Text and Color
Text and color are simple elements that can say a lot about your company. For example, if all the text on your website is in black and white and an elegant script font is used, a visitor will feel that the website, and the connected company, are very fancy and upmarket.
The same applies if you want to create a website that has a lot of energy and makes the visitor feel pumped and excited, then maybe using large bold text and bright colors such as a hot red will be better suited.
2. Interactive Elements
Finding ways to make your website more interactive is a good way to make your visitors feel engaged, and want to spend more time on the website. Functions like image maps and flash allow for seamless transitions between pages and features while also creating an animated but polished and professional look.
While something like an animated button is not incredibly important for creating an amazing website, it does add that little something extra that may impress a visitor and make them think, “Oh, that was cool”.
It is small items such as the example above that will leave your visitors feeling that your website has a great identity and those little items are what will make your website stand out.
3. Create Value
One of the main goals of a website is to create stickiness, meaning to create longer sessions for each visitor as they spend more time making use of the website and its functions. To do this, the website needs to create value for the visitor in multiple ways by not only providing valuable information about the associated company, but also empower the visitor to find the information, product, or service they are looking for and act upon it.
In order to create value for your website visitor, you need to make sure that the information they are searching for is easily accessible, and not too long while still being meaty enough to get all the information they are looking for.
If the content on your website is difficult to find, long-winded, and not impactful or useful to the visitor, the website will not have a good feel to it and it is highly unlikely that the visitor will return in the future.
4. Flow
In continuation of creating value for the visitors on your website, the value that you create for your visitors (in the information or desired products etc.) should be laid out in a manner that allows them to easily navigate to and discover.
Exploration through the content and pages in a website should feel natural and easy to the visitor, and not like a task where they feel like they need to search for where the content they are looking for is hidden.
A balance needs to be found between media and text used on each page, and this balance is entirely dependent on the type of website in question and the type of visitor that will be viewing the website. Any media added to a page should complement the content present, and vice versa, in order to create an aesthetically pleasing look, and natural feel to each page.
5. Page Load Speed
Is there anything more annoying than that never-ending loading wheel? Probably not and this is why it is so important to have a snappy and responsive website.
Optimizing the page load speed so that users across all devices experience text and media that loads efficiently, is vitally important for leaving a good impression of your website to its visitors. The feel of the website will be negatively impacted if you fail to do this, which means it is often one of the first things that should be focussed on when building a website.
6. Links To External Sites
Something that really counts against a website and negatively impacts its stickiness, are links that lead to external websites.
This is most commonly seen when ads are present on a website, or even if links to affiliate and partner sites are implemented. While the importance of ads and external links on your website do have their purpose, they should be used sparingly so as not to remove a visitor from your website, with the possibility of them not returning.
This negatively impacts the feel of the website as it removes the visitor from being immersed in your own website and content, and can even be viewed as poaching your website visitors.
There is plenty more blog content from Oviond to check out, so take a look at what we have to offer
