Design is something that we as a human race are paying closer and closer attention to because we understand the significance and value of it. Web design is perhaps one of the most important characteristics of a company as everyone is spending more time online, and a good or bad experience on a website can mean the difference between taking action or quickly heading elsewhere.
Below, we – a Canadian web design company, offer four elements that need to be taken into consideration when thinking about quality web design.
Design For a Good Visitor Experience
Your website only has a few short seconds to get the attention of a visitor and then engage him or her before a decision is made to stay or go. Think about what you want to experience when you land on a new website – you want value of some sort, easy navigation, and be able to get what you’re after quickly. Some companies adopt the premise that a website should be built for Google and other search engines, but that’s a big mistake, because if you can get lots of visitors but not keep them and get them to take some sort of action then your company is wasting its time. Understand what your visitors are wanting and looking for when they first arrive on your company’s website, and then deliver those things within a simple to use and clean user-interface.
Strong Calls to Action
Converting website visitors into prospects or better yet, customers is important, and the design has a lot to do with it. You immediately want a visitor to establish a connection to your website, and then your company should be looking to build a lasting relationship in some capacity. Well designed buttons and other visual calls to action that motivate visitors to add a product to a cart, subscribe to a newsletter, download a piece of content, or do something else that has business development value is critically important. Where calls to action design elements are located is also very important, you want them in places where visitor’s eyes are going.
White Space Is Important
White space or empty space is sexy as it creates much-needed buffers between each element on a web page – the text, content images, ads, margins, etc. Busy websites just confuse and frustrate visitors – everything on a page needs room to breathe and be given an opportunity to be picked up by the eyes which are moving fast in every direction. Clean design allows page content to be easily digested and then organized in visitor’s minds so they can make a decision for what to do with it.
Need For Speed
You might not think that design and page load times go hand in hand but they absolutely do. Attention spans are getting increasingly shorter and every extra second it takes to load a web page runs the risk of the visitor leaving your website forever. Less is more when it comes to page load times, so much like lots of white space is needed, so too is minimalism of content as well plus the optimization of element sizes matters very much too.