There’s no point in designing a beautiful website unless it’s intuitive. When creating a website, navigation must be a breeze for the user. An intuitive website does what the visitor expects it to do, and is instrumental to providing a first class user experience that ultimately leads to higher levels of engagement and conversions. Creative flare, style and appearance are obviously important but moving easily and logically around your website is essential.
Think about your content
Language is something we use every day. We speak it, write it, read it and sometimes mangle it. With a web site, language or content is a double-edged sword. Clever use of language is great. It informs, entices, leads and guides the reader. You want that. But language has two potential disadvantages.
- The wrong use of words
- Too many words
If your text is poorly constructed, confusing or worse, boring, your website is in trouble. It can be hard enough to have potential customers reach your site. Getting them to stay and connect is the next step. Users won’t stay and they will disconnect if your text is not engaging or relevant.
‘Less is more’ applies to so many aspects of life, not least of which is the content of your website. No matter how well written your content may be, having too much of a good thing can have a negative effect. This is described as content overkill, or in visual terms, the website as being ‘text heavy’. That’s where knowing [a] when to cut or reduce your text is a skill and [b] replacing text with graphics fixes two problems with the one mouse click. A picture paints a thousand words so think about getting your message across visually. It all begins and ends with your web design.
Is your site on every device?
The digital world develops at a sometimes frightening pace. Just when you think you’ve created something wonderful for your digital marketing campaign you discover you’ve missed the boat. A fabulous website, which can only be viewed on a desktop computer, is an ancient almost pre-historic website. To prove a point, hop on public transport and observe your fellow passengers. They’re reading, surfing, buying and communicating on phones, tablets and the like. In fact, more than 25% of total web searches are accessed from mobile devices. So make sure your website works is optimised on all these devices because there’s nothing worse than a site which won’t sit easily on a hand held device.
Don’t pop up
Pop-ups feature big-time in the list of things that really annoy people on the ineternet. They are annoying, they can be counter-productive and they are everywhere. If you want to capture email addresses there are better and more strategic ways of doing so. If you wish to promote a new product or service, there are far less invasive ways of doing so without appearing desperate. Pop-ups are the nemesis of user experience and can send a visitor away from your site in a nanosecond.
Slow equals fail
Every web user has a different device and their connection speed will vary. Now that being said, the faster your website loads the faster users can begin engaging and interacting with your site. If the landing page takes forever to appear you are dicing with failure. Of course most issues with the download speed can be overcome with clever design and development techniques. In fact all issues can be dealt with, improved and made to operate like clockwork with the right web designer by your side.
