One area of web design that sets us apart is user experience. We have talked about the importance of user experience many times and we are adamant about creating a site that people like to use, find intuitive, and want to come back to. In fact, we take it so seriously that we constantly question our designs by challenging it. We are always trying to see how useful it is and what the experience is from the user end perspective so that our clients realize a noticeable difference in their site’s performance.
Here is an overview of the elements we focus on:
Site Navigation
Creating great site navigation is one of the most important parts of a website design project. Navigation needs to be well organized, easy to use and intuitive. Your visitors will be using your main and side navigation menus to find what they are looking for, so it will be a core element of your site’s success.
If the navigation is confusing or unorganized, visitors will abandon the website and go elsewhere to find what they are looking for. It’s important to understand that navigation concerns the whole site as visitors can come in from many pages, not just the home page. For that reason, navigation must be adapted to each individual page and make sense to the bigger picture.
Graphics for the Web
Well designed graphics for your website are important to your site’s look but also needs to be relevant to your content. Using graphics only to make your site visually appealing will confuse your site’s visitors. Web graphics need to be added into your content in a way that makes your content stand out while also supporting your content.
Graphics also need to have a fine balance between quality and file size. Using highly defined graphics can make your site visually pop but it can significantly slow down the loading time of your site. Loading time can increase abandon rate and also affect your search engine rankings, so it’s nothing something to be ignored.
Search Friendliness and Accessibility
While it’s important to make sure that your site is visually appealing, the priority should be placed on making it search engine friendly. There’s no point in having a great looking site if you cannot attract traffic from the search engines.
You site also needs to be accessible by all mobile devices and different platforms. More people are using these devices to surf the Internet, so you need to make sure your site is compatible and is also designed for the optimal user experience for these devices and platforms.
Site Architecture
Site architecture takes a big role when your site starts to become bigger. Having proper site architecture makes it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. This is especially important for eCommerce sites that naturally have many pages due to the number of products being sold.
Content Layout
Using the same formula or setup to publish and format your content can be visually redundant to your visitors. Much like visitors develop banner blindness, they can develop content blindness. That’s why it’s important to have diversified redundancy. This can be done by using preview summaries, teasers, links, and points for action.
Capturing Corporate Philosophy and Culture
It’s of utmost importance that a websites represents a company correctly. It needs reflect their culture, philosophy, branding aspects and product lines. Visitors should feel congruency between the website and offline presence. The online experience should feel the same as walking into the retail outlet or office of the company.
As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into the way we approach web design. There’s a deeper aspect of design that many other firms fail to recognize or simply ignore. Because we focus on these elements, our clients’ sites perform better than those of their competitors.