A well- designed website fixates both on visuals and customer integration. This website decides the fate of your organization by reflecting its accomplishment. Since it is the mirror of your organization a customer will visit your website without even taking a single look into the business. And if it’s not done conscientiously you have a high chance of losing potential customers. To avoid this mishap and leverage your business growth in this pandemic, it’s strikingly important to have strategic planning to hike your website. Though it sounds like a lot of responsibility, we are here to make this task a little less fancy for you.
So, let’s peer into the term ‘website design’ and it’s principles that would direct the business one step ahead of your competitors.
1. What is Website Design?
Website design is an emphasized deed to create a fascinating message for the probable customer while resonating with the business goal. It takes a calculated strategy to benefit the growth of a business as well as customer retention through website designing.
A recent study by Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab claims that 75% of global businesses’ credibility relies on the visuals of their website.
On the other hand, research by Gitte Lindgard, of Charleton University suggests that customers take not more than 50 milliseconds to device an opinion about your website.
2. Crucial Principles That Would Make Your Website Shine
The booming of design trends in this accelerating market left some of the companies confused about where to start. And to help with this problem we have devised seven essential steps that would help to retain ahead in the competition.
a. Find the Goal and Align With It
Before setting out for a new venture, it’s always advisable to do a market study. Without scrutinizing the evolving market if a company attempts to launch on a new website, then it ought to get crippled. Through performing a critical survey you would get true insights on your customer’s preferences and needs. Now, those insights on customer preferences help you streamline your company’s objective and design a goalpost. Therefore, aligning the contents in concert to your company’s goal would no doubt retain the customers to your website with a promise of loyalty. Since the purpose of your company is to boomerang the best of customer attention, the content has to regulate customer engagement and sales. To help with this, your appointed designing team can look for classical yet trendy actions like:
I) Golden Ratio
If you are a newbie in website designing, you should instruct the hired designing team to opt for a golden ratio planning before designing your company’s
With this, your website would look for accurate and further appealing to the customers. It is a mathematical ratio used in classical designing of Greek Architecture. The ratio roughly sums up to 1.6180 which is also referred to as ‘Golden Mean.’ With the help of this ratio, designers find out what to put into the website and how much space they would conquer depending on the importance.
ii) Visual Hierarchy
It is the arrangement of contents depending on their sizes and importance. Visual hierarchy talks about the way your eye moves and perceives the website. With this, designers sort on what should go first.
For instance, the larger the size, the visitors would view that in order of importance. Similarly, contents should be placed according to their priority and hence would engage the customers into the website.
b. The Intuitive Yet Simple Design Is The Key
Always remember that a simple design increases the usability of a website, and making it intuitively provides a personalized experience, pulling more customer attention. If your website is drenched in heavy data and bad navigation then your potential customers would likely walk away. They would shift to your competitor’s pages for the accomplishment of the unfulfilled task leaving your website to crash. And to avoid this mishap it’s crucial to have a simple design with good navigation so that your customers finish the task they have started on your website. Otherwise, there would be no purpose in creating a visually pleasing website if your customers can’t use it properly. An Intuitive yet simple design not only makes the tasks easier but it also initiates towards the best customer retention.
c. Focus On User Engagement Designs
We have mentioned on the first principle that it’s a necessity to survey customer’s preferences along with the changing market. Now, through that previous survey, your designing team would develop ‘user engagement designs’ for the website.
With this, the website leverages the growth of the business based on the user’s understanding. The designers with the help of this principle create a website that users entirely relate to and leave with a delightful personal experience. The motto of this principle is to survey and apprehend the user’s inclinations.
Most of the businesses mechanize a Multidisciplinary Design team that includes engineers, designers, marketers, shareholders to form a website based on user feedback. Thus, the user engagement design boosts the customer experience alongside aiding their agony.
d. Think About Accessibility
Your business aims to hold onto customer loyalty and this should also reflect on your website as well. Now, to get a confirmation on your customer’s loyalty, it’s essential to sustain their happiness. This bliss comes with easy and alluring access to your website. Maintaining the guidelines of the previous survey, your design team should choose colors that are pleasing to the customer’s eyes. Therefore, subtleness is the key to a customer’s mind. So, the background data shouldn’t trounce the content and vice versa. It also defines the readability of your chosen font. The fonts should be in harmony with your content and colors. Simultaneously using fonts of contrast colors than the background would lift the lucidity of your website resulting in exceptional customer reviews.
e. Opt For Mobile-Friendliness
A census has confirmed that around 62% of the global population accesses the internet through their mobile devices. And hence, it’s important to make sure that the consumers have access to the website through their mobile phones as well.
According to a source, daily mobile usage will hit 155 minutes by the end of 2021.
As daily mobile usage is increasing at such a rate it is essential to make the website mobile-friendly post the pandemic. So, if customers are quarantined without a laptop or a desktop, it would not be a big deal anymore. With this, customers would not only gain a personalized experience but also help in assuring the highest retention than ever before.
f. Consistency Should Be The Mantra
Consistency is the main mantra of web design. It plays the role of a string that holds the company logo, navigation, typeface, colors all together in a congenial saga. With consistency, the website design imparts huge positivity into the customer’s psyche by developing the usability and learnability of your website. This golden rule not only certifies less monetary usage but also demolishes the room for mistakes that could eradicate a customer. A nicely- consistent website drives the customer to commit adherence.
g. Grid-Based, F-Pattern, Z-Pattern Is The New Black
#Grid Based Layout
The grid-based layout is a methodical and steady structure of a design that creates a cadence on the website. With this layout structure, the designers make the website look more professional and tidy to the customers.
It helps in adjusting the contents into boxes, columns, and sections forming an aesthetic pleasure in the customer’s eyes. This method has a calculated metric of using unit-level cells into 20×20 pixels to represent the composed unity.
#F-Pattern Layout
The F-pattern talks about the way an observer’s eyes look into the website which is first across the top, secondly down the left side, and lastly across the page.
With the help of this layout, customers scour through the website comfortably. Though the customers feel comfortable they are not going to read every word on the website. Thus, it’s crucial to give them a peek into a structured arrangement for embracing their attention.
#Z-Pattern Layout
While the F-pattern layout is good for bulky content pages, the Z-pattern layout works best for minimalist copies mainly the post-click landing pages containing call to actions. With it, the visitor’s eyes travel from the top left to the right corner, wherein the central components prevail.
After this, the eyes navigate down to the side of the visible page ultimately retreating across. These last two imaginary lines consist of information that assembles the call to action. Using this Z- pattern layout revamps the conversions of the webpage.
So, What Did We End With?
Having a well-balanced website is quite important as it is the face of your business. And, due to the heavy demand for restoration post the pandemic season, the importance of a good website is not going to slow any sooner. With the accelerating market, the perspective of businesses is changing. So, to stay afoot ahead in this competitive game play, it’s necessary to have a delightful website. Thus, before hiring a well- trained design team, glancing into the market and the above points are advisable for the best customer retention.
Pratip Biswas is the Founder and CEO of Unified Infotech, a New York-based web design company that has been featured in Deloitte Fast 500 | Fastest growing tech companies in 2018. His company is working with Enterprises, SMB’s and Start-ups to improve their efficiency through Digital Adoption and help them discover new possibilities through constant innovations. Pratip also writes regularly on Blockchain technology and has been published in publications like “Yourstory”, “Dzone” etc.