When designing a website, it’s important to keep in mind who you’re designing it for. Of course, you want the result to be something that satisfies you, something that captures and makes your ideas, brand, and style desirable.
After all, who would want a website that they personally find boring and even ugly?
With that said, it is the interest of your website’s visitors that is of utmost importance. A website’s lifeblood and the most telling detail of its success is the sustained attention of its visitors, not the amount of time it took to create and not simply the amount of “clicks” it receives.
So how can your site attain the elusive, indispensable quality of: “user friendly?”
- Layout – Let’s start with the surface. The first thing that a user sees when arriving at a website homepage is the site’s layout. The popularity of certain types of layouts changes with time, and it’s helpful to have a pulse on which styles happen to be fashionable at the time of your website’s design or re-design.
Avoiding outdated trends is a smart and efficient way of informing your site’s visitors that they have arrived at a relevant and well-maintained corner of cyberspace. Unless you’re interested in designing an intentionally “retro” website, (like the official site for the 1996 basketball movie, “Space Jam”), you might want to avoid, for instance, incorporating the practice of “framing” in your site’s code.
This style of web layout went out of vogue during the early 2000s. Instead, keep an eye out for what popular sites look like. At the moment, the trend is the “carousel,” which displays an assortment of featured content on your website’s homepage.
But that, too, could easily change in the near future. An awareness of and alertness to the trends in page layout could be the reason your website stands out – the reason it holds its visitors’ collective attention.
- Interactivity – In addition to a site that looks good, you want a site that works well. That “working well” consists of a functional, rewarding kind of interactivity. Highly interactive sites successfully hold visitors’ attention, but these sites also may require plug-ins whereas a non-interactive site typically does not.
The plug-in download requirement inevitably will deter some visitors from your site, so you have a trade-off on your hands. It’s a question of finding a balance between the user magnetism of interactivity, and the inconvenience of its required plug-ins.
On your own, locating this happy medium can be difficult just the same as knowing exactly what the trend in web design is at any particular moment.
What’s in style? How much is too much interactivity?
The value in web design services is that they are fueled by and comprised of large teams of experts who attentively monitor the web. The combined knowledge and research of these experts make for a website that has a built-in awareness of its context within the web and a unified brand.
Web design services take the diverse tasks that web development requires: coding, graphic designers, copywriters, SEO experts, etc., and gather them into one cohesive process.
Give us a call at (916) 661-8422
