Insights.
Why beautiful design is not enough for a successful website
08 May, 2017
Technology
Website design is one of the first things a visitor notices when they land on a website. Based on the design, the visitor forms an image and opinion about your website and your company in the first few seconds. There is no doubt that web design is extremely important for any business website. If the website looks nice, modern, and pleasing to the eye, visitors will prefer to stay on the page and create a positive image of the company.
But web design is by no means the only thing that should be taken care of when creating a new website. There are other very important factors that will make your website successful - web design is just one of them. You should never insist on a particular design at the expense of other key website factors.
Here are the other five key factors that make a successful site:
Website speed
There are countless design templates and design solutions that can be used to create a website. But the main question is what is the performance of these design solutions when it comes to website speed. Some websites, no matter how beautiful they are, drive away their visitors due to slow loading times.
Ideally, the web page will load in less than 1 second or 2 or 3 seconds. In the worst cases, loading can take 10 or more seconds. Today's users are no longer willing to wait that long and will leave a website before it has even loaded. When choosing a company to design your website, consider how the design will affect its performance. In this case, you will get a complete product - a design-beautiful page that loads in an acceptable time frame.
You can measure your website speed here.
Good user experience
A good user experience includes many segments, such as:
Intuitive navigation
For websites with multiple sub-pages, organizing the content into clear and intuitive categories is essential. This makes it easier for users to find the information they need. This is especially important in the case of a web shop. E-commerce websites typically offer a wide variety of products. To provide a user-friendly shopping experience, it's essential to categorize products into logical groups. This makes it easier for customers to navigate the website and find what they're looking for.
Enough "white space"
White space represents exactly what its name says - white space on a web page. The eye focuses more easily if there is nothing distracting around the content, but there is enough white space, i.e. emptiness. That is why it is important that the website is not cluttered with all kinds of additional content that will interfere with the normal consumption of content.
Responsiveness
Responsiveness is the adaptation of the website to all devices - mobile phones, tablets, and computers. Responsiveness of the website is taken for granted nowadays, but it is still important to emphasize that your new website must be adapted for all devices.
Check here if your site is mobile-friendly.
Consistency
In the case of a website, consistency is very important - it will remove the doubts that visitors might have in case of inconsistency. A few examples of the consistency expected of a website are:
- Consistent font size
- Consistent colors
- Consistent design elements
- Consistent layout of subpages
Every page on your website should look consistent with the other pages on your web. That way you won't confuse visitors and the overall experience of the website will be better
Quality and complete content
Potential customers, after all, don't come to your website for a beautiful design, but for the useful content they expect to find. It is up to you to fulfill that expectation so that you do not lose potential customers.
In this discourse, we will extensively discuss strategies for crafting superior content. However, for the present purpose, we present a concise compilation of essential guidelines to ensure the quality of your web content.
Write detailed content
With the content, answer all the questions that your potential customers might have. The best content is the one after reading, in which the reader has no additional questions. It is not recommended to have website content that only briefly covers a topic and leaves the reader with unanswered questions.
When writing about any topic, it's important to cover everything. This applies to product descriptions, blog articles, contact information, and other content. This provides that the reader obtains all necessary information. Not describing your product or service well could push potential customers to rivals' websites which might better explain their offerings. As such, it is crucial to accurately portray and articulate the unique value and benefits of your offerings to attract and keep customers.
Structure the content well
Today, people can hold attention less than ever. Microsoft's research showed that people's attention span has decreased to just 8 seconds.
Readers have short attention spans and rarely read content from start to finish. Instead, they scan content and select parts that catch their attention and appear interesting. For this reason, you should structure your content so that it doesn't look like one huge block of text, but you should use it in your content:
- Subtitles
- Lists (like this one)
- Styling like bold and italic
- Separating the text into paragraphs (approx. 5-8 sentences per paragraph)
Insert a few pictures or videos to spice up the content
What can be shown in pictures should be shown in pictures. It is not for nothing that they say that a picture is worth 1000 words. People understand content much more easily if it is accompanied by relevant images that explain it in more detail. Pictures round off the content, and with them, the content does not seem boring.
Video content is also useful. If you are selling a product, it would certainly be helpful if you could show how that product works with video materials. Thus, potential customers will be better able to get to know the product and be more confident in their purchase.
Add links to other useful content
Adding links to other relevant content, either from your website or someone else's is good practice for 3 reasons:
- Readers are satisfied because they get direct information where they can read more about the topic
- Google likes to add links within content, which is good for ranking on Google
- The visitor will not leave the page but will go to another page on your website - in the case of a link that leads to another page on your website
Easy-to-read content
Don't use complicated technical words that your potential customers won't understand. There is a good chance that your potential customers are not that expert in your industry and will not understand the technical words you would use. The content should be written so that everyone can understand it.
Call to action
For the success of the website, it is also extremely important to have a call to action (CTA). Before you begin creating a website, consider its purpose. Do you want to collect leads, inform customers about your offerings, enable direct sales, or something else? Either way, a call to action will make your website much more effective.
What exactly is a call to action? It can be a button or some other design element that invites potential customers to take the desired action, such as:
- Sending inquiries via the contact form
- Subscriptions to the company's newsletter
- Downloading sales brochures, etc.
- Free demo software downloads
- Shopping through the website
After determining the purpose of your website and your desired outcomes, you can define the appropriate call to action. This could involve inviting visitors to make an inquiry, download a brochure, make a purchase, or take another desired action.
If you 'call them to action', potential customers will act and do what you want.
Conclusion
Much more thought and knowledge goes into creating a website than it first appears. A website is not only a beautiful design, but behind a quality website is a lot of knowledge and experience, a lot of trial and error learning. That is why the website should be left in the hands of experts who will take all these segments of the website into account when creating the website.
Read more:
http://www.templatemonster.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-website/