Partner Article

Five Web Design Tips

If search engine optimisation can be seen as the art of drawing people to your site, then web design is the art of keeping them there. The overall design of your website can have a significant impact on how long people remain on your site, and whether they will return again. Here are five simple web design tips that could help to increase the length of time that people spend on your website, and to guarantee return visits.

• Use a colour palette that’s easy on the eyes – This might seem like an obvious point, but it’s surprising how many websites ignore this in favour of snazzy backgrounds. For the most part, websites are functional, so save the art for the Tate and think about what colours and designs will be appealing but unobtrusive. If you have an established and trusted offline presence, it’s often a good move to incorporate your brand colours into the design.
• Make your navigation clear – When people visit a site for the first time, it’s vitally important that they can find their way around easily and intuitively. Text-based buttons along the top or left-hand side of the page are oft-used formats, and ones which most users are highly familiar with. In addition to this, the words you use to title the navigation buttons should be clear and descriptive.
• If you have advertising, make sure it’s unintrusive – No pop-ups, pop-unders, cursor following annoyances or other advertising gimmicks. Modern web users can tolerate significant amounts of advertising, but not when it’s getting between them and what they’re actually trying to do online.
• Break up text into digestible chunks – Long passages of unbroken text should generally be avoided online, unless there’s a specific reason for it to be so. Chunking your information into short, easily scannable paragraphs and pages makes for a more user-friendly experience, and increases the chances that people will stick around.
• Link internally to related pages – If you’ve got more information elsewhere that you think is relevant to the page the user has been reading, don’t miss the opportunity to link to it, and further deepen the user’s engagement with your site.

Take some time out and spend a few moments with your website. Look at it from a prospective client’s point of view and really consider the points we have gone through in this article. Talk to one of our web development experts about implementing any changes necessary to keep visitors on your website and turn those clicks into calls.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .