Tips for Designing a Website That Wows
Nowadays, having a great website is just as important as having a convincing business card. Therefore, it is in the best interest of your business to design a website which wows and captures the customer, thereby securing a business deal. The obvious benefits of a well-designed website are greater visibility, increased sales revenue, repeating online customers, better brand awareness and brand loyalty, and accurate product feedback from customers. But what are the most important tips for a website which wows?
1. Content is King
Build your website on the desire to provide something of use to your client – be it a product, useful information, or service. This content must be professionally and flawlessly written, and regularly updated to reflect the latest trends, news and developments. For example, a website selling clothes can feature articles on how to combine different pieces of clothing with various colors, while a services page might briefly explain the service process. These are engaging and will incite the users to bookmark the webpage, revisit it, share it, and hopefully buy. Furthermore, they create the impression of a competent and trustworthy company.
News sites usually rely on ads for revenue but their ratio of ads to quality content must not exceed 25%1.
2. A Beautiful Color Scheme
Before designing the website, you must choose a color scheme appropriate to your industry and stick with it throughout all the webpages. Customers do not like sudden change and could consider one page as a different website if it uses different colors or templates. Using bright colors is a way to calm and reassure users; red incites and empowers them; while green and brown are associated with nature and natural products2. Consider your competitor webpages and their color schemes for ideas.
3. Easy navigation
New users usually find it difficult to find their way in an unfamiliar website so good navigation is vital to ensure recurring visitors. Dropdown menus are a good way to provide quick access to many areas, but they must always be positioned in the same place. Additionally, each page must have “Back to the previous page” and “Back to the home page” buttons. Finally, a good search function will help users look for old articles or products, which are not easily found with the dropdown menus.
4. Special effects and animation
Few special effects actually add value for the customer but they require fast and reliable internet to be seen by the user. Unfortunately, many users do not have this luxury and tend to skip animation- and effect-heavy websites. Perhaps the animations could be moved to a subcategory so that the user is given a choice over whether to view them. If this cannot be done, move them to the end of the page in order to enable the user to browse everything else while the animation loads.
5. Images
A wow-inducing website makes full but good use of images as a substitute for long descriptions. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and clients can better comprehend graphs and charts rather than raw data. Furthermore, pictures of products and happy clients are a convincing sales technique. However, optimize your images for faster loading and do not cram every page with multiple images as many users will be forced to wait quite a lot.
6. Edit the content for better visualization
Ensure that the page is wide enough so that most users are not left with huge strips running on both side of the page on their screen. Furthermore, format the text for pleasant reading – nobody likes overly long or unduly short lines, nor too much text crammed into a small space.
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