Ivonne FloresWe here share with you 6 steps for having one of the best websites, focused on having an exceptional design; improving the users experience of your website; and reducing the percentage of dropouts.
6 Steps To Create One of The Best Websites
1. Make a great first impression
Your website represents who you are and what you offer. When people see you for the first time, they are thinking:
- Can I trust this site?
- Is it professional?
- Is this believable?
- How can I find what I want and need?
- Does this site make me feel at home?
- Am I at the right place?
You need to ask yourself all of these questions when designing your website. Now, although the design/looks of your website may not be the most important asset overall -people often pay too much attention on how a site looks rather than how it works- it does play an important role in making a good first impression .
Tips for a great Web design:
Right use of colors
Use the right colors to catch your audience's attention and to select items. Don't try to make everything stand out at first sight, if you do, the result will be just the opposite: everything will be the same, nothing will specifically stand out. Avoid a chaotic mix of colors on your website, choose few basic colors -that match- for your templates and marketing materials.
Animations, Gadgets, and Media
Avoid all the unnecessary ones. Flash animations might be trendy but they're a bad strategy. In most cases, it's better to avoid using animated backgrounds and background music. Use media and animations only when they help to support specific content and information.
Design
Build a navigation structure that's easy and understandable. Organize the elements of your site in a way that they make sense (don't place them everywhere, randomly). Don't be afraid of leaving white spaces. Avoid the mess, basically.
Typography
Make sure your website is readable. Use font types, sizes and colors that are easy to read. To make the scanning of the page easier, use lists with bullets, headlines for each section and short paragraphs. Make sure your information flows well, from left to right and from top to bottom. It's almost always better to have a white or very light-colored background with black or dark text on it (easier to read).
Good quality content
While design is important, we mustn't forget that, in the end, great content is what visitors are after. A well-designed website could convince visitors to take a closer look, but it won't be seen twice if the content isn't useful and well organized. Remember, you will never have a second chance to make a good first impression.
2. Maintain consistency
It's always best to keep the elements of your site fairly consistent, not very different from each other, from page to page. This elements include colors, sizes, design and their placement as well. Your site has to have a good flow from page to page. This means that the colors should be basically the same, as well as the fonts and the design structure. The navigation menu should remain in the same place throughout your whole website.
For the structure design, there are typically three kinds of page layouts for most websites:
- Home page
- Content pages
- Form and landing pages
For example, your homepage will have a different layout than a landing page for a PPC campaign. Keep the elements of these designs consistent. This will help your visitors not feel lost.
3. Use images on the right
Be careful when placing meaningful images on your site. Each image is sending a subconscious message to your audience and sometimes, the result might be different from what you expected.
We recommend you use pictures that are indeed related to your business and avoid adding "pretty pictures" just to decorate your site.
4. Create a solid navigation system
Perhaps one of the most important factors to make visitors stay on your website, is by having a good and solid navigation system, one that will support all search preferences. In fact, more than three quarters of the people who answered a HubSpot survey, said that the most important factor of a website's design, was how easily they could search for something on it. If people can't find what they are looking for, they will give up and leave.
Things to keep in mind when creating the navigation menu of a site
- Keep a simple navigation structure at your home page, and at the top part of every page.
- Include a navigation option at the bottom of your site's page
- Leave breadcrumbs on each page so people can keep a record of their navigation
- Include a search box at the top of your site so that visitors can search by keywords.
- Don't offer too many navigation options on one page.
- Don't dig too deep. In most cases, it is best to keep your navigation options at no more than three levels deep.
- Include links within your copy of the page and be clear about where those links are leading to. This is also very good for your page's SEO.
- Avoid using complicated JavaScript - especially flash - for browsing. Many mobile phones cannot read flash (yet), so they won't be able to navigate on your website. The same goes for web browsers that haven't been updated with a flash version.
- Put yourself in your audience's shoes. Ask yourself if your site is obvious to them in terms of where they should go to when trying to find what they need and want.
The general rule that the best web pages share is that they have an adequate and simple navigation structure. In other words, visitors are not required to think hard regarding where they have to go to and how they can get there. Make it easy for them!
5 Limit your Flash and animations
If you are using flash or require animations, consider choosing HTML5. This is a great compatible-with-Flash navigator alternative.
6. Make it reachable/available to everyone
Make sure that anyone who visits your website can see your information regardless of what browser or application they're using. In order to get significant traffic, your site must be compatible with multiple browsers and devices. With the growth of mobile phones and tablets, people surf the Internet more than ever, be there for them!
