When designing a website, many businesses end up making unintentional blunders that usually drive away a potential customer. Whether you want to boost your brand awareness or generate potential leads, it is imperative to focus on designing a user-friendly website that engages the users and makes it easier for them to navigate through different pages.
Now, every business owner has their own perspective of a great design, but in general, there are a few golden rules that’ll help you improve your website’s usability and keep the user engaged for a longer period. So, in this guide, we’re going to talk about a few of these designing rules that you must remember while building your website from scratch.
Keep it Simple
The simpler your website design, the easier it would be for the visitors to make decisions. No doubt, adding captivating elements will make your website visually appealing, but it would distract the user from what they came looking for.
That’s why it’s always recommended to add minimum (yet necessary) elements so that your website looks appealing and doesn’t lose its basic functionality at the same time. Moreover, a simple design will also make it easier for the user to navigate between different pages and easily find the services they want.
So, take a look at your website and remove every unnecessary element so that it doesn’t become a clutter of too many graphics.
Add Images
Images are worth a thousand words. This phrase can’t be more true when you’re designing a website with a vision to engage visitors. Instead of adding huge blocks of content, adding images would make your website look more aesthetic as well as cleaner.
However, you can’t add any random image on your website as this can do more hard than any good. While choosing an image for your website, it’s always a great strategy to add real and high-quality pictures of products (if you own an e-commerce website) or your employees (if you’re designing a service-based website).
Adding human faces on a website looks more professional as well. However, if you decide to add stock images, make sure to choose unique pictures as they’ll help you stand apart from the crowd.
Few Conventions are Good
It’s no secret that being creative with the website design will make a huge difference in turning a one-time visitor into your potential client. However, it’s also worth noting that sticking to a few conventions is necessary as customers have gotten used to them over the years.
For instance, you must add a navigation bar at the top of every page, which contains links to every other web page on the website. This will make it convenient for the user to go to any page whenever he wants.
In addition to this, you must add a logo of your website at the top-left corner of the navigation bar. And, more importantly, clicking this logo should redirect the user to the homepage of the website.
Maintain Consistency on Every Page
The most effective way to entice your website visitors is to maintain a design consistency on every page of the website. For instance, if your home-page has a “red & white” color theme, every other page should follow the same color sequence.
Similarly, elements like font, image size, content structure, etc. should be the same on each page of the website. The most common mistake that many business owners make while designing a website is overlooking the consistency factor.
If your website lacks the required consistency factor, the visitors are more likely to go back to Google SERP and look for other options. It means that poor design consistency can make it quite challenging to boost the overall conversion rates.
Website Usability
Among all the designing factors, website usability remains at the top. It won’t matter how many visual elements you’ve added to the website; if it fails to provide the desired functionality to the users, it won’t help you turn them into potential leads.
In saying that, you should always think from the user’s point of view while designing a website. What services and features would help users resolve different queries? Answer these questions and make sure to add the elements that provide the required functionality.
In a nutshell, website design and usability go side-by-side and one can’t simply survive without the other. So, make sure that your website is visually appealing and fully-functional at the same time.
Conclusion
Website design plays a critical role in engaging a visitor and directing him through the entire sales funnel. So, make sure to follow the above-mentioned rules so that you can design a captivating website that hooks your visitors. In case you need any professional assistance, click here, we have a skilled and highly qualified team of website designers who have worked on dozens of projects and have the potential to design your website as well.