Everyone knows a website should be attractive and inviting. But that’s only one facet of good web design. Websites should be designed and created to provide a great user experience, meaning that users will trust and share your content, boosting your SEO results and driving new sales and enquiries.
Here are just some tips to follow when thinking about how to move from an attractive website to a truly successful one:
- Clear navigation – think about how you categorise, structure and present the information architecture of your website. Test it with users and listen to their feedback. If they’re struggling to find a certain page, product or piece of information, you probably have it in the wrong place.
- Fast loading pages – this is where many beautiful websites fall down. Their pages are finely crafted and look gorgeous, but they take forever to load. Not everyone has superfast broadband, especially if they’re browsing on the go with their mobile phone, and you need to bear this in mind. If people get bored of waiting for a page to load, they’ll leave and visit a rival’s website instead.
- No dead links – there’s nothing more guaranteed to send your users elsewhere than links that don’t work. There are tools you or your web design agency can use to automatically check the links on your website, so there’s no excuse for dead links.
- Browser compatibility – your website should look good in all browsers, not just Internet Explorer. You should also think about how it looks to users accessing your website from mobile devices like phones and tablets.
