How important is an excellent website design? Well, according to a study, your website only has 50 milliseconds to make a great first impression. If your site doesn’t impress your prospective customer, they’re going to leave. A different study discovered that approximately 38 percent of online users would stop using a website if they think its content or design is unappealing.
That represents an enormous loss of profit, especially now that more and more businesses are digitizing. You need to make sure your business’s website is attractive as well as functional. The following are a few simple guidelines for creating a practical and beautiful site.
Keep It Clean
No one likes a cluttered homepage, much less a cluttered website. Resist the urge to pack your homepage with all the information and features your site boasts. No one wants to read through a thousand words the first time they see your page, and there’s no need to cram a lot of photos or videos into one screen.
Learn to make judicious use of white spaces and pare down your word count. That makes it easy for your prospective customers to process information. A decluttered website also ensures it will load faster, yet another feature online users find appealing.
Have a Clear Message
You need to focus on what your site is all about. You need to get to the root of what makes your business unique and make sure your website manages to convey it to your audience. For example, sites for insurance brokers can focus on how reliable and trustworthy their services are. Meanwhile, a restaurant website can concentrate on the cleanliness of their kitchens or the speediness of their delivery times.
Focusing on one message helps declutter your website and refine your content. It also enables you to decide which features you need to put on your site. In the restaurant example above, customers will appreciate a real-time tracker for your deliveries.
Ensure Functionality
You need to make sure everything on your website works with a single click. Go through all interactive elements of your pages and ensure that you do not have any of the following:
- Dead links. These are hyperlinks that no longer lead to their destination pages because they no longer exist, or something is wrong with the code.
- Bad buttons. Like dead links, these are buttons that don’t perform their functions.
- Inoperable features. These can range from videos that no longer work to on-page apps that aren’t functional.
Weed out any of these non-functional elements from your page to prevent frustrating your potential customers and driving them away.
Make it Mobile
According to a survey, as many as 72 percent of Internet users will be accessing the Internet exclusively on mobile devices. You can’t afford to alienate these users by not making sure your website isn’t responsive. A responsive website means that it reconfigures its size and features to make it accessible and usable on the smaller screens of mobile devices. If you’re not sure how to check if your website is fully responsive, you need to work with an excellent website designer to ensure it’s still attractive and functional.
Website functionality and design are just as crucial to your business as refining your operations. As your digital storefront, ensuring your website appeals to users should be your top priority.
