Corporate competition has become so tight that there are millions of websites on the web right now. You now have to pay so much attention to the design of your website. There are so many sites on the web that visitors will only spend a minute on your website before they decide to either read further or bounce off.
This is why you must really work towards giving your visitors great experience to make them stay longer on your website and also come back regularly. Here are some important tips you should apply while designing your website.
Mobile friendliness
The importance of making your website mobile friendly cannot be emphasized enough. Right now, over 93 percent of internet users access the internet via their mobile device and the figure will keep increasing. So, any website that is not mobile friendly is really not a website. This is the most important tip of all.
Whether you have to revamp your site or you have to take it down and redesign it from scratch, you just need to make it very mobile friendly if you need traffic.
Consider the technical aspect
A lot of web developers just focus on the user interface and the content of their sites. They don’t understand that some layouts make it difficult for search engine bots to crawl them. So, you have to design the lay out of your website to make it easy for Google spiders to access every page.
May be you should consider using WordPress. This is because websites developed on WordPress are usually automatically optimized for search engine. However, even after developing a search engine optimized website, you should also hire an SEO expert to help you increase the rank of your website.
Use great contrast in all your webpages
In some websites, visitors face color contrast issues. The color of fonts used in some of their webpages is not really distinct from the background color so visitors usually have to strain their eyes to read whatever content is on the pages. This kind of mistake can discourage visitors. Some of them will bounce off when they get to the point where they have to try hard to read the content on your website.
This is why you must subject every page of your website to a thorough test before you launch it.
Simple layout
Simplicity is important. Visitors like websites with simple lay out so that it will be easy for them to find their way around the website. So, you should make your website very simple. You should cut off all the links, buttons, and functions that are not related to the main purpose of the site.
In this regard, you are better off with fewer web pages. Some people believe that you can impress people with a lot of webpages. This is very far from the truth. The higher the number of webpages on your website, the more difficult it is to use. Google is arguably the most popular website and it is the easiest website to use and it is a simple one-page website.
To make it even easier for people to use your site, you may create short cuts for the most frequently used functions so that the visitors will have easier access to them. All these give visitors a great user experience.
Fast response
Internet users are very impatient so they want a website that will respond as fast as possible. It starts with loading. Your site should load as fast as possible. In fact, it should take less than 10 seconds for your site to load fully. Apart from loading, all the pages and links on your website should also respond as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, sometimes the cause of the sluggishness of certain sites is their server and not the site itself. So, you should spare no expense in getting a great server service provider. You should consider a very high redundant rate. Don’t concentrate only on great web development.
You must also avoid frequent downtime. Frequent downtime will discourage visitors from coming back to your site.
Little or no ads
Ads and pop ups may not be a big problem when people are accessing the internet through a PC. It is because they consume a negligible amount of screen space. On the other hand, they are very annoying and distractive on a mobile device. This is why it is better to disable them on your website by default. More people will visit your site through their mobile device. Too many ads may discourage them.
Include videos
It is very important to include video clips on your site. Google loves informative and educational videos and as such sites with videos usually rank higher than the ones without videos. Besides, videos pass more information than images and text.
Another reason to include video is that it attracts visitors more. People are more likely to watch short videos than reading text. Most importantly, videos linger much longer in the minds of viewers than images and text. You know videos will give you a count of how many people have viewed it. This can be used to calculate its conversion rate. Images and text will not give you that.
Videos are also more likely to go viral. The more your videos go viral the more your brand will become popular. This means more credibility and brand reinforcement for you.
However, there are a few tips to apply to make the best of your videos. First of all, you have to make them very brief. If a video is too long, people will not watch it. A great video should be about 30 seconds to 1 minute long. You must also include their duration. People check the duration of videos before viewing them. If you do not include the duration, people may assume that it is very long and ignore it.
No matter how brief your videos are, not every viewer will get to the end. So, you should pass the most important information first. Finally, to make your videos go viral, you need to include a little bit of humor. People will laugh and share it immediately.
In conclusion, there are several other ways to boost the user experience on your site but the ones outlined above are the most important ones.
