There are certain techniques that need to be universal in a website design. Here are a few of the techniques that we focus on and in my humble opinion, should be implemented in every design.
- Clean & uncluttered
- Ease of use
- Calls to action
- Speed
Clean & Uncluttered: This seems fairly straightforward and easy to achieve, but then why do we all go to websites that are crammed full of a ton of information all fighting for your attention? Clean design makes the user of your site feel at ease, by not scaring them with information overload. Uncluttered pages that aren't afraid to use white space help the user digest information with feeling overwhelmed and that feeling keeps users engaged on your site. The higher the engagement on a site and the more pages that are visited create a massively a higher possibility of achieving the website owners conversion goals.
Easy to Use: Ease of use is another concept that feels easy to achieve. However, we have all visited sites and realized we can't find the navigation or the contact information and we don't know what to do to make it work. Many times designers are focused on creating a cute design or a cutting edge one of a kind design. These approaches sound great, until the reality of using the site sets in and it creates frustration with the user who just abandons the site because it is too difficult to use.
Call to Action: The reason most businesses have a website is because they want to persuade someone to use their product or service. So in the end we want the user to "Contact Us", "Visit our Showroom" or "Schedule an Appointment". If these are the things we want our users to do then we need to make it easy for them to do it. A call to action on almost every page reminds the user what we want them to do. Essentially if we are trying to accomplish a goal with the site then we must use a call to action.
Speed: A slow loading website is a non starter for most people. No one has patience and making people wait to see your site is just bad form. Our websites are always ranked in the top 90th percentile for speed and generally load in 2 seconds or under which is the unofficial cut off time for website loading speed. We utilize a multitude of different technologies and coding optimization to help make sure all of our sites load quickly.
To learn about additional techniques that we employ with our designs, feel free to visit some of the articles below. FYI, these articles are a little more "in the weeds" but they give you an idea of some of the things that we focus on.
