When a person visits your website, they should expect a good user experience. They do not want to be guided through complex navigation menus, search for information in a crowded page or read a page that is not pleasing to the eye. In spite of providing quality content on your website, if you cannot provide a positive user experience, you can neither convert nor retain customers. So with this in mind a good website design, should be as user friendly as possible.
Good Website Design with Visual simplicity
First impressions have a great influence on a visitor. Simple visuals, which clearly portray content that is sought on the page, are always impressive. A major benefit of simple web design is that it impresses maximum number of visitors. Every person has their own interpretation of beauty. When response of website visitors to different kinds of designs was studied, it was found that more than 70 percent of visitors like websites that provide simple yet present information with powerful clarity.
A good website design should make creative use of icons and features to enhance clarity. For example, you can colour code different elements to make features stand out and enhance visual appeal simultaneously. Use of text colours that contrast well with the background ensure a break in monotony of a single colour scheme on the page and makes text stand out clearly. You can also run usability testing to see if the design appeals to your audience.
Use standardised Layout Techniques
Visitors come to your site for information, be it textual, visual or audio. In order to ensure a positive user experience, make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for by not deviating too much from conventional placement strategies.
Top of the page navigation links, boldly highlighted titles, easy to spot dropdown menus and providing a second navigation bar at the bottom of the page are some good website design practices in this regard. They increase the likelihood that users can easily navigate your site without learning the layout first.
Prioritise Content
Take a moment to prioritise content. For this, you have to analyse the activity on your site and study which kind of content finds maximum hits on your page. Use these categories on the main page and highlight them suitably. Content that experiences lesser number of hits can feature lower down the page. This ensures two things. Firstly, most of the visitors find what they are looking for within seconds of entering your page and secondly, almost all visitors scroll down to the bottom for more interesting content.
With good website design, what is above the fold is most important and that slot should go to the most important content of your site.
Image Choice
A well chosen image speaks volumes about your business and its objectives and character. A wrongly chosen image fails to make a connection with your business and is ineffective. Choose pictures that instantly reflect the character of your website and are bright, focused, attractive and of high quality. Make one or two prominent images take the focus of the page. Avoid crowding and aim to bring a balance between images and texts.
With awareness about target users’ aesthetic sense and the skill to implement these aspects into web pages, you can create a good website design that your customers enjoy and hence, ensure that they re-visit your site time and time again.