In this day and age of digital marketing, your website has become a more powerful tool than ever before. Your website is a constant salesperson and it has the potential to become your most powerful asset, at the heart of your marketing triumphs.
However, ever-changing digital trends can make your website feel a little outdated. While a little redesign might seem ideal, you might not have the time or the money to invest in a project of this scale.
Your website is the core of your digital marketing antics, and designing a great website user experience requires an understanding of the different problems that visitors have, in order for you to solve them.
I’ve put this blog together for you to get the best tips possible, and to make your customers’ user experience the best it could possibly be.
Use White Space: Less is More
If you’re attempting to get a lot of content above the fold (the section which is immediately visible without scrolling), having an overload of white space might be replacing some valuable information. I’d suggest you to find the perfect balance between what is most important to communicate at the top and surround that with some space to highlight the image or text or both.
By doing this, it allows your readers to focus their attention on the most important elements and each part of the homepage also provides a clear header and a few supporting points which makes it much easier to take in information.
Ensure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Your website has got to be both responsive as well as mobile-friendly. The vast majority of us use a mobile device or tablets to access the internet so it’s pretty imperative for your design to load efficiently regardless of the screen size that it’s being viewed on.
Google has also started to penalise websites which aren’t adapted to mobile use, so if you’re wanting to show up on the main results, you need to ensure your website is responsive…if not, you’ll suffer the consequences!
It’s a fact that people are five times more likely to leave your website if it isn’t mobile-friendly, so we ain’t lying — it really will cost you!
Is Your Page Speed…Speedy?
I’m sure you can agree when I say that one of the most aggravating things when we’re using the internet, is waiting for a page to load for longer than we’d like.
With the rise of mobiles devices, people are hopping on the net and accessing content all over the world through a variety of different platforms. When people are browsing online at Costa Coffee sipping a flat white or watching Coronation Street on their laptop, they expect a fast result for the content they want.
When they don’t get it, well, you’ll know, they certainly don’t get a surge of patience, they leave. Slow page load is an interrupting experience for the user, which is going to serve you little or no business at all.
If you’re currently making the shifty emoji expression, I think I’m right to assume that you’re feeling a little bit guilty right now. So, to improve your page speed, you should start by compressing all of your images before putting them onto your website as this can contribute to major slow page speed.
Use Piccies
We’re all getting smarter at judging a company’s website before deciding if we want to browse the site any longer. Think about it, when you first visit a site, can you easily pick out the generic stock photo you’ve already received elsewhere or that resembles the non-personal style of stock photography? Oops.
Using stock photography can decrease trust and also stand out as generic and completely unoriginal, and unfortunately, this association will carry over to your business as well. Ultimately, no stock photography will be capable of putting across your brand, services, and products in the exact way that you want to. Only your own images are going to do this while speaking clearly to your potential customer.
Use images strategically and place them in your website to support the content and allow the users a visual break from text, but ensure they’re relevant and not what you’ve seen before too many times.
Keep Up with Consistency
By consistency, I mean having everything matchy-matchy. The choice of your fonts, the colouring, sizes of your headings, spacing and overall design elements should all align. In order for it all to be one coherent design which adheres to the whole website, it needs to be themed property in order for it to look professional. Big changes from one page to another is easily going to cause your user to feel disorientated. After all, they should always know what they’re looking at on your website, and what to expect.
Make Your Calls to Actions Pretty
Your customers are already used to following visual cues to decipher which content is important to them. Calls to actions (CTAs) that are clearly marked with an action word allow your website visitors to easily navigate around your site, and get exactly what they want in the place they expect to find it. Think about the psychology of colour when you’re creating your links and buttons for your websites CTAs. Different colours will evoke different messages, so choose your colours wisely, it’s more important than you might think.
Watch those 404s
Even though search engines won’t penalise you dramatically for having these kinds of errors here and there. You know the kind, the ‘page not found.’ When a user clicks on a link, they’re expecting something to happen, whether it’s a video or a picture, or just another page of information, that user is waiting for it. Remember when your parents would buy you an ice cream on holiday and half of it would have melted down your hands before you got to eat it? Well, it’s not that bad but we’re definitely halfway there. The thing is, 404s can easily destroy your user experience, and the last thing you want is to leave your users unsatisfied at this point in their journey, and that’s not going to get you anywhere is it? Nope.
Final Thoughts
I think it’s fair to say that we can all agree on the fact that the digital world is growing faster than we can properly keep up with. Nevertheless, this is giving us all an irreplaceable opportunity for the users to have an outstanding user experience.
To increase the users’ experience a little more, keep in mind all the points I’ve spoken about in this blog. As well as developing your website to the highest standard possible, all of this is guaranteed to increase your potential customers’ experience on your website. If your website isn’t top-notch, you can’t really expect them to trust you, can you?
