If you know what you are doing marketing-wise, you have already won half the battle. Once you have gotten your business and website into view, however, you now need to make sure that people enjoy using your site long enough for them to complete a purchase.
Ugly websites that are difficult to use abound on the internet and a poorly designed website usually correlate with an underperforming business. This makes perfect sense, given that it takes a user around 50 milliseconds to form an opinion on your website. Below are some of the things you can do to improve your web design and promote high-quality user experience.
Maximize your page speed
While good websites have a lot in common and employ several common best practices, there are a variety of site features that come down to personal preference. However, one aspect of a website where there is unanimous agreement is the importance of speed.
Many website designers will tell you that even just an extra few seconds of load time can increase a website’s bounce rate (the rate at which people navigate away from a page) by over 20 percent. There are a lot of things you can do to improve your loading speed, and one of them is compressing your images before loading them.
Have tactful and prominent calls to action
People are already used to following a series of visual cues when deciding which content is the most important for them. When you utilize calls to action that are marked with important action words, you make it easier for people to get from point A to point B on your site.
Point A to point B for most businesses means getting people from the product page to the checkout page. An important, and often overlooked factor when it comes to navigation is colour scheme and unambiguous words that prompt action.
Make your hyperlinks obvious
An easy-to-navigate website invariably provides a pleasant user experience. All good modern websites make excellent use of hyperlinks, and knowing how to direct your visitors using hyperlinks will be a key part of your success.
Traditional hyperlink colours like blue, red, or pink tend to provide the best clickthrough results, and independent studies back this up. Hyperlink conventions have stood the test of time, so best not to play around too much with these. As long as they stand out from the rest of your text, and people know what they are, they should be successful.
Segment your key information with bullet points
In the digital era, people have short attention spans. They want to be able to get most or all of the key information from a page in the shortest amount of time possible. Big walls of dense text are hard to wade through and tend to discourage reading.
Part of user experience means having high-quality content that is informative and easy to digest. If you are unsure of how to approach blog and content writing, there are experienced professionals out there who can take your content to the next level.
Conclusion
Think about websites you currently use and, more importantly, ones you like to use. You may not realize just how much careful thought and planning has gone into creating a great user experience. This process takes time, as well as an understanding of what consumers like and avoid.
Bad websites with good products can disappear quickly online, so it is vital that you have a site that incorporates web design best practices. If you want to create a site that will serve your business well, always keep the above user experience considerations in mind.
