Have you ever encountered a website so atrocious that you had to close the page? Whether you were frustrated by its functionality or annoyed that you had to click around to find what you were looking for, your bad user experience dissuaded you from exploring the site further.
Your website is a representation of your brand’s personality, so make sure that your site design conveys the right message. Here are design trends you should implement or avoid in order to have a more user-focused website:
Web design do’s that foster customer trust
- Your website is mobile friendly
As mobile usage is skyrocketing, your business must capitalize on this trend by creating a responsive design website. Responsive design creates a consistent experience for your customers, so regardless of the device they are viewing your site, they will see the same, fully functional design without having to zoom to read the content.
By improving your customers’ mobile browsing experience and minimizing their frustration, you increase your site retention rates and create a better customer experience, which will improve conversion rates. The benefits of a responsive design website thus outweigh the cost and effort of creating it, because when you optimize your site for mobile, you show your customers that you not only understand their needs but are also willing to go above and beyond to meet those needs.
- Your website is streamlined
These days, simple doesn’t mean cheap or inadequate. Now, simple is all the rage in any online design aesthetic. Go to any authoritative website and you’ll notice that the majority of them utilize an incredibly minimalistic design: simple color palette, larger font, less text, crisp photos, high-res videos, longer pages, endless scroll, and plenty of white space.
In today’s media-saturated world, simpler is better. It’s easier on the eyes, quicker to scan, and more effortless to navigate, which minimize the amount of clicking and deciphering your customers must do on your site. Simple web designs thus show your customers that your business is honest, straightforward, and have nothing to hide from them.
- Your website content is trustworthy
Shady SEO tactics and painfully bad copy simply don’t work anymore and are surefire ways of getting a Google penalty if you don’t fix your site content. After the last couple of Google algorithm changes and plenty of warnings from Google that they will no longer tolerate black-hat SEO, ranking high on search engines require high-quality site content and business blogs.
When your site copy is clear, concise, and contains no spelling errors or grammatical mistakes, it shows that you are knowledgeable about your work and are meticulous enough to double check it. Your customers will thus be confident that when they buy your product, it will be top quality.
Website dont's that discourage customer visits
- Your website is distracting
Pop-up ads, animated banners, dense text, and distracting images are all a thing of the past. Anything that interrupts your customer’s site experience is a no-go. People already have a short attention span; you want to minimize the amount of distractions they have, because if you bombard them too much, they’ll just leave your site.
Distracting sites tell your customers that you care more about pushing your own agenda than their experience, which will alienate them from your brand.
Considering that Google’s average load time is approximately half a second, it’s not surprising that your website’s load time is a key factor in determining your website’s search ranking and usability. In fact, it’s been proven that 40 percent of people will abandon a webpage if it takes more than three seconds to load.
People simply don’t have the patience. If your website is slow to load, it shows that you neither understand their needs nor value their time and their business.
- Your website is difficult to use
It’s already a difficult feat to get consumers on your site; don’t make it hard for them once they’re already there. If your navigation bar is confusing, your contact information is nowhere to be found, and you have a ton of broken links and “under construction” pages, you might as well be telling your customers that your business lacks focus, you don’t spend time thinking about how your customers behave, and you don’t want to spend money to fix what is broken.
Your website is typically the first point of contact for your potential customers; therefore, underestimating its importance can damage your business’s reputation and relationship with your customers. When consulting with your web designer, spend time thinking about your customers. Make sure their first impression is a good one.