By Osky Blue | Published December 22, 2015
When you’re contemplating your business’s website design Frisco TX – either for a brand-new website or for an old one that needs a facelift – think about the many websites your potential customers are inundated with every day. With so many websites, yours should stand out from the crowd in as many ways as possible – the most important of which is user-friendliness. Let your own online experiences inform your website design decision-making. How many times have you quickly clicked away from a website that seemed to actively be trying to make browsing their site difficult? Here are 3 ways you can avoid that same experience on your own site:
Though you may have a lot of information you’d like to convey to your customers, think twice about overloading your website with content. Too much content, poorly laid out, will confuse users and make them click away.
▸ Make sure to keep text blocks short and intersperse them with graphics or photos. You want to be sure to grab your customer’s attention and long, unbroken blocks of text won’t do that.
▸ Surround even small blocks of text with at least some white space – space that isn’t cluttered – to ensure that your customers are focusing on what you want to highlight.
▸ Choose fonts that are readable. The accepted wisdom is that sans serif fonts work better on the internet. Don’t mix too many different fonts, especially on one page and try to ensure that there is adequate contrast between background colors and text to achieve maximum readability.
Simplified navigation is effective navigation. Remove clutter and limit the number of menu items for a site that will be easier for your customers to use.
▸ Don’t make your layout confusing; your customers want you to help them find their way around. If you have a dropdown menu or other navigation tool, place it in the upper left hand corner, which is where most people expect to find a menu.
▸ Consider adding a search bar to your site. By adding search functionality, you’ll not only help your visitors manipulate information they’re looking for, you’ll also be able to track searches, which will give you more information about what users want.
▸ Avoid using abbreviations and acronyms that can make your website confusing to users who don’t understand them. Use website buzzwords like “home,” “about,” “contact us” and “support” to give them some concepts to latch onto on each page.
Nothing is more frustrating than waiting for a web page to load and if your site takes too long – more than 4 to 6 seconds – you can be sure users won’t wait for it.
▸ Limit the number of long videos, large photos or flash files on your site. Though you may want to make your site more enticing by loading it with these types of media, you’re going to slow the loading time of your site to a crawl.
▸ Compress images to minimize loading time. For JPEGs, a compression of 60 to 70 percent is a good balance between size and quality. Also, remember to resize images before uploading them onto your website.
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