One of the most important aspects that have a direct effect on your website’s user experience is its design, and an exemplary design that takes user experience in tight consideration may require an extensive expertise. If you are planning to improve your website’s design for a better user experience, it’s best to hire a design agency that knows their stuff.
A good web development agency is well-equipped and knowledgeable to customize your site in order to suit your particular business needs while integrating the latest technologies and content optimization techniques that will help your website rank better in search engines.
In addition, web development and design agencies should know exactly how to create and incorporate a smooth user experience that will create a positive browsing experience for your website visitors. From your website’s ease of navigation to its appealing layout scheme, UX is an integral part that contributes to a robust website that successfully drives visitors into conversion.
We listed down a few tips and tricks that good web developers and agencies alike should keep in mind during their design process for a stellar website user experience.
Make Use of Whitespace
Even on the onset of the internet, cluttered websites have never been effective. In fact, using whitespace in between texts in your website as well putting margins along the page can help improve users’ comprehension by about 20 percent. By using whitespaces, users find it easier to focus on the important details in the text. Not to mention that it gives your website a fresh and clean look.
A good creative web design agency will have a good grasp of how to use whitespace in designing your website. They should also be mindful of the fact that too much white space takes up space. A successful use of whitespace aims to find the balance between the right amount and the right set of information to highlight above the fold, and the whitespaces to be incorporated in the design.
In order to achieve this balance, identify the key details that should be visible in order to utilize whitespace to its best potential.
Catch your 404’s
Users hate encountering errors. Fixing your 404 errors is a big step in ensuring your users a better browsing experience. In fact, only 23% of visitors who encounter a 404 error page attempt to find the missing page – the rest (77%) will not make more effort to reload or search for this page.
During a search, users expect their search to lead them to a specific page. In case they encounter such error, they’ll most likely leave immediately – making your business lose potential customers. This scenario is both unacceptable from a customer and a business standpoint, so it just makes sense to eradicate 404 errors in your site. Fixing your website’s 404 errors won’t just provide your visitors with a pleasing browsing experience, it will also help your business get more sales by reducing exit rates.
Improve Your Site’s Navigation
Incorporating an intuitive and simple website navigation are important when trying to create a great website design that will promote a positive user experience. To know whether your website already has a good navigation or not, you’ll have to make an effort to know how much time users spend on your website. This will help you know which areas they are having a hard time reaching, or if they are able to reach the page they need at all.
From here, you should put up a sitemap and a navigation tab on your website to make it easier for your visitors to get around your site. While your website’s ultimate goal within the World Wide Web is to be found, this should also be the goal of your web pages on your website.
Use the Right Images
Always remember that the aim of a pleasing design is to appeal to your customers visually, so it’s very important to use the right images on your website.
Thankfully, there are now thousands upon thousands of readily-available images you can use for free. By simply browsing the right keywords in stock photo hosting sites, you can choose images that embody your message and use them accordingly. However, be wary of using too much stock images as they can come off as impersonal and tasteless. If you really have to use more images than you thought you would, it might be a good idea to hire a semi-professional photographer to help you out with your website design.
On the other hand, if real photographs are not in line with your design mantra, there are a number of techniques you can use to create the right visual language to communicate with your audience. It might be best to partner up or hire a web design artist to get the best results.
Opt for Responsive Mobile Design
Given the major shift in people’s browsing preferences that is now mobile-centric, our technologies are now becoming more optimized for mobile. It is therefore imperative to have a mobile-friendly website that is easily navigable even with the space constraints and varying sizes of mobile devices. After all, not having a mobile-responsive website can hurt your SEO ranking, making this the single most valuable feature that your website should definitely possess.
The Bottom Line
Though a website’s design may appear to be purely for aesthetic purposes, it actually works towards a more meaningful purpose: positive user experience and SEO ranking. Your business can’t flourish to its full potential without offering a good user experience on your website. By being user-friendly and by incorporating the best user interface design principles, your website will encourage visitors to come back again and might even possibly become repeat customers.
Author Bio:
Kenneth Sytian is the Owner and CEO of Sytian Productions, Philippines Web Developer. He has been designing websites and developing web apps for more than a decade. He is the driving force behind the company and an influencer in the industry of web design and development in the Philippines.
