“User-friendly”, is a term that can never be overstated in the business world of website design. This is the ultimate goal when designing a website. Your website can be as ‘fancy’ as you like but if it’s proving to be a maze to get through, it is no use to your potential customer. There are 4 main elements to lock down when designing a new website:
- Readability
- Navigation
- Mobile Friendly
- Load Time
Readability
You want to make sure your website has the ultimate ‘scanability’ factor. Your potential customer should be able to easily scan and find keywords they are looking for on your website. This could mean two things, make sure your content is relevant, loaded with the keywords you know your customer will be looking for and it could also mean not to bombard your website pages with reams of content. Keep it short and simple.
Readability could also be affected by the colour scheme of your website or even the font of your text. Make sure your text contrasts well on the colour of your website background so that it is easily readable.
Navigation
Design your website in the mind of the user! It is so important that your website is easy to navigate through. With high speed technology growing every day, we are used to getting things quickly and easily, so the faster the better, or unfortunately the user will lose interest.
The easier your site is to navigate through, the more time a user will spend on your website, which in turn means your bounce rate will decrease.
Mobile Friendly
According to the internet monitoring firm StatCounter, more users around the world are accessing the internet from mobile devices than from desktop for the first time. StatCounter reports that the internet usage in Ireland from October 2009 to October 2016 portrays desktop usage decreasing over the years to 57.6% and mobile usage increasing to 42.4%.
Therefore, it is very important that your website is tested to make sure it is mobile and tablet compatible.
Load Time
A good load speed time for a website should be around 4 -6 seconds. Your visitor’s patience is the ultimate test, people want results fast and if your website is not performing, they will lose interest and go elsewhere. If your website is image heavy, these images need to be resized and compressed, so not to effect page load time. Keep up to date on your website maintenance to make sure your website is performing at its best speed.
Website Design, Using Experience To Get It Right
Here at IMS Marketing, we identify the needs of our clients before designing a fully responsive, user experience that surpasses expectations. Our in-house design and development capabilities ensure that the needs of our clients are met, by combining the digital strategy of IMS Marketing along with current web development technology.
We have developed numerous custom-built websites for our clients, that incorporate content management systems to facilitate easily updatable user content. Specifications have included e-commerce platforms, customer portals, blogging functionality and social media integration.
A key part of our approach for every web design project is our ability to measure the success of the project. We integrate analytics and user tracking into every site so that we can deliver key performance metrics to our clients so they can see for themselves how we can transform their online presence.
Check out our Web Design Portfolio and keep up to date with our social media where we will be showcasing our Web Design Projects!
If you’d like to learn more about our Digital Marketing Services, call IMS on 091 739450