Web design has a big impact on the user experience. A site that is clean, fast, and easy to navigate is more enjoyable for users compared to one that is slow and cluttered. But, does web design make a difference on your bottom line? You bet. It’s one of the most important parts of your digital marketing strategy.
Below we share the different aspects of web design to pay attention to and how they can be improved to boost the user experience.
Site Appearance
When visitors come to your website, its appearance influences how they feel toward your brand. The best sites have updated, modern designs that reflect the latest trends such as responsive design, bold fonts, rich media, and parallax scrolling.
The trends do change quickly and you don’t need to apply each one to your site. Choose the most important and relevant ones. Multimedia and responsive design are two trends that are not going away anytime soon. They are recommended for all websites. Stick to trends like these for the biggest impact.
Site Speed
People do not like to wait for websites to load. The majority of web users expect a site to load within a few seconds. If it doesn’t, they’ll find somewhere else to go. Google knows how important load times are, which is why speed is a major ranking factor.
To reduce site load time, optimize image sizes, choose a single font and remove autoplay multimedia. It can also be helpful to add more white space. White space reduces data demand because there are no images, videos, or text to slow things down.
Professionalism
Your web design leaves an immediate impact on visitors, which could be a good or bad thing depending on when your design was last updated. Ideally, your site should be consistent with the trends and also appear established, trustworthy, and respectable.
The content is just as important as the design. Use your web pages to share background information on your business, tease photos of your products and services, and display the working relationships you have with customers.
Navigation
Improving navigation helps web visitors find what they are looking for. The most popular navigation styles include breadcrumb and drop-down menu. Breadcrumb navigation takes each page that a user visits and adds it to a navigation bar. This way, users can bounce back and forth as they need to.
A drop-down menu allows users to hover over a menu title to see the category. They can then click on the pages that interest them. If you like elements of both navigation styles, combine them. Drop-down menus can be included on your homepage while breadcrumb navigation can follow users when they click on new pages.
Your website has an important job. It must look good and perform well. By applying the tips above, you can create a better website that improves the user experience.
