Knowing how to design a website, in today’s competitive online world of marketing, is essential but not enough to convert leads for a brand on the internet, especially if it is new and less popular than its competitors. The user experience of a website plays a key role in the process of persuading an online visitor to convert on the website, whether a conversion means a purchase or a subscription or an email sent for enquiry.

Let us understand how web design and development impacts user experience and how to design a website for the smoothest user experience possible, starting from the basics.

What Is Website Design and User Experience?

Website design is the process of creating a website or web page(s) to reflect the brand identity and marketing information of a business, ensuring a user-friendly experience.

User experience (UX) is the overall experience of a consumer using a product, particularly in terms of how pleasing and easy it is to use. In this case, the product is a website and its use is navigation or browsing.

Because a great user experience translates to a high conversion rate, every business with an online presence needs to know how to design a website in a way that prioritises it.

How Does a Website Design Layout Affect User Experience?

A website design layout shapes user experience by:

• Building Brand Image and Trust

A brand’s website is like its face. It’s what people check out when they proactively wish to know more about a brand. Therefore, website design carries the huge responsibility of creating the desired brand image and maintaining brand trust among its potential customers. It also reflects the professionalism and sophistication of a business.

Grabbing and Directing Attention

Clever website design can grab a website visitor’s attention and direct it to the elements of a web page that they need to notice in order to convert, such as CTA buttons or text that reveals ongoing offers or discounts. Thoughtful website design can also help site visitors navigate web pages better and get to the content they are in search of or is of the most value or use to them. All it takes is a little visual highlighting that makes the important information stand out from the rest.

• Affecting the Website’s Loading Time

Website design is one of the main factors that affects a website’s page loading time, which needs to be below a certain limit to keep website visitors on the website. It directly impacts user experience – the lesser the page loading time, the lesser the frustration of the site visitor. And the average site visitor’s attention span is only going to decrease in the future due to increasing internet speeds.

• Impacting Functionality

Apart from offering a clean and appealing presentation, great web design also has the ability to add to the functionality of a website. Website design can also change how easy or difficult it is to navigate a website and carry out procedures like online transactions.

• Determining Responsiveness

The website design layout is the key factor that determines the responsiveness of a website. It is what maintains the desired impact of a website on different screens. It enhances user experience by offering a layout that caters to the device used to access the website.

How to Design a Website for an Amazing User Experience?

Here are the best web design and development tricks for a hassle-free, pleasant, and memorable user experience:

• Optimally Utilizing White Space

A lot of white space on a web page may seem like unused real estate, but it is actually an essential aspect for good website design. It shouldn’t be your goal to utilise all of it to include more marketing content. A certain extent of white space makes your website content more legible and enables visitors to notice the surrounding elements as well.

According to data by Crazy Egg, the inclusion of white space around headlines and other text causes an increase of 20% in user attention. White space does, however, occupy space, so it is best to include all the important information you need to convey in a concise manner. Include only the content that deserves a visitor’s attention on the web page.

 

• Minimising Website Loading Time

Waiting for a page to load is one of the most common problems in a website’s user experience. Because of getting used to higher internet speeds, website visitors now have less patience than ever before and therefore expect almost immediate results for what they are looking for online. If they don’t get them, they tend to bounce, i.e. leave the website.

As per data by Section.io, even 5 extra seconds of page loading time can increase the bounce rate of a website by over 20%. Google’s recommended loading time for ecommerce websites is less than 2 seconds. Read More for some actionable ideas to minimise your website’s loading time.

• Using Attractive CTAs

The average internet user is accustomed to following visual cues, such as buttons, that highlight the part of the content that is the most important to them. A call to action (CTA) encourages website visitors to take the necessary action they need to take in order to convert. It is what all your website content eventually leads to. Therefore, you should highlight it accordingly. Writing a short and simple CTA including a verb or action word helps website visitors understand exactly what they need to do. Different colours evoke different emotions. Therefore, understanding the psychology of colours is also essential for designing effective CTA buttons.

• Highlighting Hyperlinks

Links are added to a web page to be clicked/tapped on page, so incorporate visual cues to make sure they are identified easily. Underlined and blue or distinctly coloured text is conventionally effective at drawing the attention of a reader and indicating that there is a hyperlink added. Understanding consumer expectations and habits is paramount to success in digital marketing. It is best to stick to conventions and not reinvent the wheel when it comes to an important function. The length of hyperlinked text also affects user experience. The longer the hyperlinked text, the easier it is to identify the hyperlink.

• Using Bullet Points to Convey Detailed Information

Bullet points are of great help in enabling a reader to absorb a large amount of information or locate the information they are looking for, such as product features, benefits, and instructions. For bullets, you don’t have to go by convention. You can even create your own icons to be used as bullet points. Just make sure they are on brand and can be easily identified as bullet points.

• Using Unique High-Quality Images

All internet users are collectively getting faster and more accurate at judging brand websites at their first glance to decide if they are worth navigating further. When a user first visits a brand website, they can easily identify a generic stock image that they have seen elsewhere earlier. Using free stock photos from popular websites can adversely affect brand trust.

According to a case study conducted by Spectrum, Inc. of Harrington Movers, the brand was able to increase its conversions on a web page by simply using photographs of its actual team of movers and moving trucks instead of stock photographs of movers and moving trucks. This shows that you don’t just require high-quality images, but those that are unique to your brand.

• Writing and Designing Compelling Headings and Subheadings

It is important to target keywords in headings and subheadings for attracting online members of your target group because search engines generally give more weight to headings and subheadings over other content. However, headings and subheadings also guide your site visitors through the web pages of your site, making it easy for them to browse through and find the content they are looking for. To keep your site visitors engaged on your website, it is necessary to write and graphically design compelling headings and sub-headings that appeal to your target group and not just Google’s crawlers.

• Maintaining Consistency on All Pages

Consistency of brand aesthetics, messaging, and tonality is essential for a coherent user experience. Heading sizes, font styles and sizes, colour schemes, button designs, spacing, illustration styles, graphical elements, tone of voice, choice of words, and photo choices are some of the aspects that require consistency on a website. Everything should be thematic. Abrupt design variations from one web page to the other can make your website visitors feel lost or confused or lose trust in your brand. Sticking to your brand’s guidelines is a good way to maintain consistency of design throughout your website.

• Detecting and Troubleshooting Soft Errors

Although search engines like Google do not punish websites severely for 404 or ‘page not found’ errors, website visitors do. When people click/tap on a hyperlink, they expect to be taken to a web page that they can navigate. It is disappointing to encounter a 404 error page and simply undesirable in terms of user experience, just like long page loading times. Read More to know the process to detect hard as well as soft 404 errors on your website.

• Ensuring a Responsive Design

Most technologies have adapted themselves to meet their users’ need to be accessible on smartphones. Websites, too, need to embrace this evolution and be mobile-friendly to ensure a smooth user experience. Responsive design has become so important that Google has now started penalising sites that are not optimised for mobile devices. A modern website design therefore needs to have different versions that cater to screens of all the various possible aspect ratios. Learn More on how to make your website mobile-friendly.

If modern website design seems like a daunting task to you, outsourcing it can be a great idea. Pop Communications is not only a marketing agency but also a website design agency that can help you with creating a powerful website for your business. Whether you’re looking for a simple website or a shopify website our full-service marketing agency can create one for you. We specialise in creating web designs, marketing videos, SEO and branding. That means we can create SEO-friendly content like blog posts and articles for you, just like the one you’re reading! To get in touch with us…

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