Like the phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, effective website design is judged by the users of the site and not the website owners. Everything about a website, including the content, the layout, colors, text styles, structure, graphics, images, interactive features, and the way it works is determined by the website design. Therefore, it is not just about form but also function and there are many factors that affect the usability of a website and sites that are not well designed tend to perform poorly and have sub-optimal Google Analytics metrics in terms of:
- High bounce rates
- Low time on site
- Low pages per visit
- And low conversions
There are principles that are set in place to make your website not only aesthetically pleasing, but also easy to use, engaging, and effective. An efficient web design serves a purpose, which is to cater to a user’s needs whether they are looking for information, entertainment, interaction, or to conduct business with you.
Additionally, visitors to your site want information quickly, therefore, organizing information using headlines and sub-headlines, including bullet points instead of long windy sentences make your information easy to read and digest. A well thought out color palette including using high-quality professional photos, infographics, display ads, and videos for your website will also go a long way to enhance the user’s experience even help with brand positioning and connecting with your target audience.
Easy navigation around a website is one of the most important components when it comes to designing a website. Having a very creative and exciting website is one thing, but if your viewers are unable to explore and move around it to find all of the important information they are searching for there is no point of having one in the first place.
You should also keep in mind that your final design will go through a website audit, which in essence, takes an analysis of your site and reviews everything from, navigation, grammatical errors, layout, website code, content flow, ranking, graphics, the quality of a website etc. These reports can help you create new online marketing strategies, give you insight into your website’s traffic ranking, bounce rates and search ratios.
It’s not uncommon for businesses to neglect the usability aspect of their website. Good website usability is simply making it easy for users to find the information they need quickly and easily. This, in turn, can improve the performance of your website, provide a seamless user experience for visitors, and in the process, boost sales and revenue for your business. To improve the usability of your website and make it more appealing for potential customers, it’s important to ensure that your site is:
- Mobile optimized
- Has simple web design techniques that can be accessible to all users
- Has a well-planned and organized information architecture
- Includes well-formatted and relevant content that is easy for readers to scan through
- It’s compatible with different browsers
- Most importantly, it has fast load times (4-6 seconds)
