It sems that, these days, a business isn’t going to get anywhere unless it has a website to engage customers, and advertise its products and services. Websites become our public face and help consumers navigate to not only what we sell, but can introduce things like informative blogs too. However, if you get your design wrong, your public face can backfire on you.
Web design might look easy but actually, getting all of the elements together so that it not only draws your customers in, but works well and operates in the right way is a real skill. Just browse the internet for half an hour and access different websites and you will soon find examples of both good and bad ones. Plainly, you don’t want your website to stand out for the wrong reasons, so what major aspects should you pay particular attention to?
A clean design. Overpopulating or crowding your website is one of the biggest problems with self-design. A high-quality design is not only attractive to the viewer, but is easy to read and gives the reader intuitive navigation throughout the whole site. Most importantly, a light-weight and quality design helps your customers to focus on the value of your brand and content instead of being presented with a load of distracting images and gifs, or even copious amounts of text that are difficult to read. Customers will often associate the quality of website designs with a company or their products. Pay attention to what is going on with your website and keep it clean.
Attractive colour scheme. Along with the overall design, the actual colours that you use can have a huge impact on how your site is perceived. If you have a corporate colour, you will want to include that as a subliminal connection for your customers, but you also need to make sure that your necessary colours don’t clash with others that you might use on your site. If you have a main colour in mind, take a look at the colour wheel and find out what the complimentary colours to it are. You can then consider how you are going to use those colours – you could look at having blocks of colour, features, or even text so that it stands out but doesn’t clash. Your colour scheme should engage, not enrage!
Good functionality. There is little more disappointing that arriving at a website that you need to interrogate and finding that the navigation elements – menu features and hyperlinks – are hindering your visitors rather than assisting them. As part of your design, you need to use your website as your customers will and uncover any problems with data transfer or broken links well before your website is used in anger. Functionality testing will uncover problems right at the beginning, but needs to be conducted all the while your site is in development since simplest of changes could result in a conflict in code which will then cause the website to behave in an irregular way. The rule is test, test, and test again.
Multi-browser functionality. You may design your website to run on, say, Google Chrome, but you also need to ensure that you include functionality – and test it – on as many other browsers that you can. You should include Microsoft Edge and Chrome to Firefox and Safari, at the very least, but also look at Opera, Vivaldi, and Chromium too. There is a huge range of browsers out there, so test and check on as many as you possibly can. Your website should load correctly on all the major browsers around, and that should also include older versions of them. If you don’t take this step may exclude a large section of your customer base, which can be a costly mistake for a new or building business.
That sounds like a lot of work to make sure that your website is capable of not only being attractive, but runs correctly too. The best way to ensure this is to get professional help with design and testing via a proper web design service or web design agency in Ashby. If you don’t you will regret it.