Today, having a successful website can make all the difference. It is important that you make your website user friendly. Below, I have listed several tips on how to make your website effective and user friendly.
- Structured Page
- Make sure you are making your page structured. It must be laid out in a fashion where it is easy to follow. For example, a grid system is the most popular way to make your page organized. Make sure your grid system does include 20 or more boxes, all different sizes, and nothing lining up properly. You do not want your customers to get confused because of the craziness of the website environment.
- Focus
- Make sure you are focusing on what is important. For example, if you are a business selling a particular product, make sure you are making the home page focus on that product. Make sure you never place irrelevant ads across your page. If your page is spammed with advertisements, people will probably never want to come back because of the awful layout.
- Correct Colors
- Knowing what your reader’s emotions are will help you choose a color scheme. For example, if you are a soothing spa, you probably do not want a loud stressful color scheme. You will probably want soothing, calm colors to make people feel welcome into you place of business. The biggest thing you should not do is use 20 different colors in your color scheme. Your colors must blend well together. If you are not good at choosing colors, there are many websites that will help you generate color schemes.
- Easy to Scan
- People will never spend more than 5 minutes trying to figure out what your website is about and what you offer. Making the page easy to scan will allow the reader to get the information they are looking for. Use the proper H tags to focus on important themes. You can also add Italics or bold important words in the text. Never, ever write long paragraphs. Make sure you are breaking up your content; otherwise people will decide that the content in the middle is not important to read.
- Keep it simple
- Make things easy for people. When you have a contact form, make sure it is short, to the point, and easy to understand. People hate to do things for too long and will go somewhere else if they feel like they have been doing something for too long. The best thing to do is the pretend you are a child while viewing it. It will help you simplify your page.
- Words Matter
- Keep your copy short and to the point. If you have trouble catching reader’s attention, it helps to hire someone to do that for you. Copy is just as important as the design of the website. If you have the right wording, it can make all the difference in the visit rate of a website. Never fill your pages full of keywords, because people will notice this and in the end, you could be penalized for it. Writing should flow as if you were talking to a person, not a robot.
- Easy Navigation
- Make your navigation bar easy to find and easy to use. I always make sure the page I am on is highlighted in the bar to let people know where they are. Your readers should spend 30 seconds trying to find the contact or about page. They should only have to click once and they are there. If you have a large website, it might be a good idea to add a search bar. Some people hate not being able to search for things in large websites.
- Optimal Load Time
- Visitors are impatient, so your load time for each page should be 1-2 seconds. You can do this by compressing your CSS files, using the google hosted javascript files. This ensures your page is coded and designed with optimal speeds. Never make your page filled with images. This will slow down the site speed greatly.
- Visually Appealing
- When it comes to websites, people will judge a book by its cover. Your website better make a good impression on people or they will go elsewhere. Utilize many design techniques to provide beauty to your website. There are a few things not to use. Do not use gif’s, scrolling text, or old graphics. These are big no-no’s and people will leave your site because of the jumbled mess.
I hope that these tips will help you make the best website design I know you can create! If you have any other website design tips, please feel free to comment below.
Written by Nicole Rende from DBC Digital, Denver Marketing
