Good art does not necessarily make good web design. Some of us may remember the early days of the web, and visiting some hilariously awful Angelfire and Geocities websites via dial up internet connections. See the World’s Worst Website Ever if you need a refresher on what that experience was like. As the web has matured so has our taste in web design. Here are three basics to ensure visitors will always enjoy visiting your website.
Simplicity
As the World’s Worst Website Ever demonstrates, animated .gifs and flashy colors are frustrating and confusing. Too many components only distract a user from their purpose. Less is better. Keep the size, color, and font of your text clear and legible. Make sure that the colors of your background and text have a nice contrast to help folks that are colorblind read and easily follow the text. To reduce the impression of clutter, use a maximum of two or three fonts .
Accessibility
Depending on the amount of traffic to your site per month, if you don’t have enough bandwidth from your hosting site, your page can become very slow to load for some visitors. The capacity of the viewers internet can also slow loading down. This is another reason it is good to keep sites simple. Compress your photos and data so that no one has to wait for the page to load. You will also want to add text descriptions behind your photos, so that anyone with vision limitations can still interact with your site. Save serif fonts for headlines, the body of your text should be sans-serif because the simplified forms are easier to read.
Useability
People don’t want to wait, so make your site intuitive enough that a user will be able to interact immediately after landing there. Keep requirements and pages to click through at a minimum. As stated by Hick’s law, the more choices a person has, the longer their decision making process becomes. If it gets too long, the user is likely to give up. People can immediately recognize ‘clickbait,’ or pages where income is generated by clicking, and they are unlikely to return. Ease of use is important, especially in this day and age where a viewer can easily find another service to fill their need.
Blindspot specializes in building custom websites that are user-friendly, visually appealing, and easy to navigate. Our goal is to not only create a site that’s easy on the eyes, but we want your potential clients to know everything about your company after only a few short minutes of browsing. Because our websites are intuitive, your visitors will never struggle to find what they are looking for. Are you thinking about building a new website or updating your old one? Whether you want a brand new site or just need some guidance on making some positive changes, Blindspot is here to help. Contact us today and let’s get started on improving your website design!