The Ultimate Guide to a Great Website

What is a good website? This is an inevitable question every time a business wants to build a new website or update their current one. Should the emphasis be placed on the visual aspects such as a sleek design, attractive pictures, videos, and graphics? Should the emphasis be placed on ease of use? Well, what constitutes a good website could ultimately narrow down to personal preference or even the industry your business is in.

Whether you should go for ease of use or visual aspects, we’re not going to focus on that in this article. What we want to look into are the web design factors that should not be ignored by every business owner. Ignoring these does have consequences, and dire ones sometimes.

Here are web design factors that business owners cannot ignore:

Font size

Font size matters since your customers will be engaging with your content on a screen. Small fonts will cause the users to strain when reading your content, and they will definitely lose interest.

Capturing people’s attention is a hard thing to achieve in today’s world where users have too much content to consume. When you manage to get a reader on your page, it is up to you to keep them. Keep your font sizes between 14 and 18px (for body text) and 35px for headlines.

Responsive design

Closely related to keeping customers on your site just like font size does is responsive design. Responsive design allows for the same user experience across different devices. This means that since most of your customers will use mobile devices to access your site, you will need not create different pages to use on different devices. To know how this can be done, you may seek the help of a reputable web design agency Manchester businesses have worked with.

Responsive design also does you a lot of good with regards to ranking in search results. Your business tends to rank higher in mobile searches. It is said that at least 50% of customers will visit a store within a day after their search. This is a good way to increase conversions.

Sliders

Keeping visitors on the site continues to be an emphasis here. While sliders are indeed attractive, they take us back to the discussion between ease of use and visual design. Sliders, of course, do make the site attractive. However, do they actually aid in communicating?

Studies have shown that users only get to click on the first item on the slide and ignore the rest. Sliders tend to distract the user as they have to try and read the information that is in the moving sliders. While this feature may be considered a standard, the best thing to ask yourself as a business owner is, “what is the best way to communicate with my customer?” When you answer this question, you will be able to determine whether you do need a slider on your site.

Other factors

The above-discussed factors are by no means exhaustive. Here are other factors that you need to think about during web design:

• Image optimisation
• Text contrast
• Text height
• Line length
• Call-to-action buttons
• How to display your pages

Conclusion

Most principles are geared towards keeping the visitor on the page for a long time. Conversions happen when users engage with the content on your website. As we have discussed, ignoring the above principles will have consequences, and sometimes the consequences can badly affect the online success of your business.