Why are online marketers always banging on about good website design?
Well, for those who haven’t watched sites’ evolution over the last 30 years or so, think of it this way: in a brick-and-mortar-based scenario, a customer walks into your store, only to find peeling paint and dirty windows, overflowing garbage and absent staff. Unless you’re selling to zombies or sewer rats, you’ve just lost a sale. Customers expect you to showcase your company ethos (and goods or services) right down to the carpet fabric in the legacy arena. Online, that can only extrapolate one way, and that is in site design.
If first impressions count in a physical store front, tick that box twice for ecommerce, because a consumer’s ability to flit through a dozen stores in half an hour is so much greater online. Design is important, not only as a baseline comparison to others, but also as both a pleasing experience and a memorable one. That is how site design becomes a detailed and taxing challenge for any business – how do you cater to the aesthetic tastes of your clients, their ease of navigation around your site – with all that you anticipate they’ll want at their fingertips – and at the same time try to present as individual, if not positively unique? The first priority for every business should be to choose the best web design company, as it is obvious that the first impression is the last impression.
Right at the outset, although ‘first impressions’ generate thoughts of colors and graphics, speed of use is already building perceptions when a prospective client clicks through to your site. Ask experienced companies like EC-MSP IT support in London, and they’ll confirm that it all starts with good tech and technical support. First impressions start from the moment your page starts loading, so although all sorts of weird and wonderful design elements were toyed with in the Noughties, ease of use trumped all of that. A slow site is one that alienates prospective clients, and it’s important to remember that the first impression is already being built even before anyone lays eyes on your site.
There’s a reason one almost never has to wait while a site churns away, downloading slowly nowadays. That kind of grind was recognized as complete anathema to consumers, and slowly materializing sites that look like they’re building in front of you as you wait for the content to display correctly are dead ducks. The standard is so much higher in the modern era. Design starts with speed, and its ability to impress or alienate visitors to your site. Users have no respect for the amazing technology that enables the internet and all of its infinite connectivity, and your website is not the place to be educating them about it. Between three and five seconds – that’s how long it takes for visitors to start fidgeting if your site hasn’t displayed yet.
‘Standard’ is not boring in website design, it’s refined
If anyone were to suggest that consumers are fickle, they’d be dead right. IT has built consumer expectations itself, so designers can’t complain. That said, some things that were intuitively included in website design since the days of yore are still compelling, while newer amendments to good sites have arisen logically as online life has grown. In a nutshell, over 90 percent of first impressions are created by site design, and seconds is literally all it takes for users to form an opinion about you and your company. Most users online will decide based on design alone whether you’re worthy of their time, no matter any other tempting considerations.
Besides speed and, again, even before talking graphics and color schemes, site layout is a critical design consideration. It’s truly here that the standards referred to above come into play. Design needs to generate a sense of familiarity and ease of use, without which user participation will start to tail off, aka sales. And one can’t mention layout without mentioning mobile. If Google is now mobile first, that’s a pretty compelling reason to make sure your site is, too. Layout goes straight to the heart of conversions – again, aka sales – and toying with standard assumptions by consumers is toying with your business online.
You can’t hope for success online if you design from any other point of departure than what users expect and demand. Peruse the top sites (they’re always available on a Google search) and shamelessly ‘borrow’ what they have done to optimize UX. Indeed, the only thing that should inform site layout is the user’s expectations and overall ease of use, not how ‘funky’ you can be. There’s a time and place for funky, but that comes into the color palette and content. The layout needs to induce feelings of familiarity and speed to checkout on an ecommerce site.
Other common features that have become standard for good reasons:
- Simplicity is elegant when talking about websites. You can throw in a bit of flash and dazzling colors, but don’t compromise on simplicity. There was a time when incredibly detailed top and sidebars tried to give visitors a glimpse of everything, but that time has passed with good reason – it doesn’t speak to the user experience. Especially with ecommerce sites, visitors are there to get a solution from you, so don’t frustrate them by trying clever positioning of standard headings or wait too long to display options in a scroll-to-reveal design. In particular, keep the home page relatively flat and simple.
- On that point, white space is a dramatizer that often goes unsung. Websites have a different aesthetic to a Rembrandt painting. Don’t succumb to the feeling that you need to fill every square inch on screen – important headings and click-through tabs are well served by being surrounded by white space.
- Continuity is also paramount. If you allow users to click through to other pages that feel like they’ve left the company and are now somewhere else, it’s a jarring experience. You can modify the design elements on subsequent pages of the site, as long as there are consistent elements carried through all The standard structure of Home, About, Services (or goods gallery) and Contact have persisted because of their inimitable logic and familiarity. Those headings are still crucial to any site, or at least any site looking for the highest number of visitors and sales.
- Save the speeches for the Blog page, and consider putting a complete ‘sales kit’ above the fold. This anticipates that your marketing (perhaps combined with a user’s own research) has brought them to the page ready to buy. They’ve seen your product or just been discussing it with a friend, and the FOMO is mounting. You can position all of the important, relevant information above the fold so that those users can simply click onto checkout and enjoy a swift, smooth visit – one they’ll likely recommend. A good formula is Heading, Subheading, Copy & Image, and a call to action (CTA) – all above the fold. This takes skill to implement, as there’s also likely a high percentage of visitors who have arrived without being primed in this way, and pushy tactics scare people. Dotting the space above the fold with ample opportunities for those users to click on further relevant intel is a good way to achieve a balance that offends no one.
There’s much more to website design, of course, but not a whole lot more to starting out well. If you can answer what it is you’re doing in business, then you can imagine both how to market to prospective clients and their journey through to checkout on your site.
Make sure it’s fast, elegantly simple, and familiar – keep those tabs familiar! – and you’ll already be at least halfway there. When in doubt, leave it out. Keep things simple and ensure a logical and easy journey through your site. It sounds simple, but that is the big deal with website design – great UX that facilitates commercial success online.