In the high-paced search and click world,a website is undoubtedly the first digital marketing tool to attract customers. It is a tool, a cost-effective solution to put in your sales-pitch 24×7. With customers browsing through numerous websites before making their buying decision, it becomes necessary for a company to represent themselves properly.
Your website should be designed keeping in mind the target audience and conversion of visitors to potential customers. It would not be wrong to say that a great design is worth a thousand words. Yet, most company websites have web design flaws that they are totally unaware of and which are costing them customers as well as reputation.
So, here’s a quick insight on the common web design mistakes and what can be done to rectify them to earn potential customers.
Capture the Wandering Eye
The attention span of the average online customer is very limited – 8 seconds according to most studies. If your website does not manage to capture their attention within that time gap, then you need to rethink your web design.
Several studies have been conducted and it has been found that people tend to view content across e-commerce sites or articles in an ‘F’ pattern. Therefore the best thing to do would be to place your most essential information, like your most important links or call-to-action buttons in this pattern.
Put your most valuable information on the upper half of the website or as it is called above-the-fold. Having said that, they do scroll down, and when they do, their eye reaches right at the bottom where the scrolling stops. This is where you can bank on to put your call-to-action. Another time-tested method to capture the wandering eyes is to use BIG BOLD headlines.
Mind Your Colour
One of the most important things that make your website stand out is the usage of colours. And it is also one of those things that is least understood and often incorrectly used. The result being – difficult to read web pages, nearly impossible to read if printed or in other words plain ugly.
Even the most seasoned graphic designers make blunders and abuse colours.
So, what are the colours or rather colour combinations that actually work? Before using any colours, you have to consider the fact that aroung 0.5% of women and 8% of men have some form of colour blindness. One of the most common being colour blind to red-green.
So, avoid using plenty of colours that will make the design heavy on the eyes. Rather, just stick to two or three basic colours and use other images and graphic symbols to make it attractive.
Readability & Legibility
Yes, an attractive design/interface does matter, but readability and legibility are crucial elements. The text should be easy for the reader to be able to grasp it. Bizarre font styles, combined with some awful colour combinations will just render the entire page unreadable.
Fortunately, there are some really simple tricks that you can use to make your site user-friendly.First and foremost, keep it simple. Simple letterforms and simpler design make the site more legible. To make it more readable avoid capitals, use a reasonable point size and create even word spacing.
Consistent Interface Design
Excessive creativity is a killer. Some designers just go over the top, and try to bring all aspects of creativity into the design. A different design for every single page within a website can be utterly confusing and annoying to the customer. So the key point here is consistency.
No matter how well you design the website, if the overall look and feel is not consistent, then customers will not be able to relate to the website and will leave the pages soon. Again the keyword is SIMPLE. If you want your customers to feel at home then a consistent template is a must. That combines with an aesthetically simple design with uncluttered page and uncomplicated menus will work wonders.
