WS - Design Tips For Web Designers

Creating a website to establish an online presence is the most elementary step to furthering your business. What most people do not realize is that if your website is not user-friendly, it will do little to help advance your business. To effectively harness the growth potential of the web, follow these usability tips from leading Boston web design firms.

Clarity: Top web design firms critically emphasize the importance of clarity to make websites user-friendly. Sites should be obvious and self-explanatory to users, with simple point and click navigation. Use clear layouts and organized structures with apparent and familiar looking links. If visitors cannot easily access what they are looking for on your site, they will not use it.

Brevity: Websites, especially e-commerce sites, or sites that offer a tool or service typically require visitors to fill out a form. Web design experts recommend that you keep these forms short and to the point; having to fill out information that is excessive in length will cause visitors to leave your site and not follow through with the order process. When one of the biggest allures for web consumers is convenience and speed, requiring users to endure time-consuming processes is self-defeating.

Privacy: To maximize business potential, web design companies suggest that you do not require visitors to supply personal information in order to try out your services. Having to do so deters users from trying introductory software downloads that they might later be willing to pay for. Let users explore and discover what your services have to offer before you ask for personal information. Once these users decide that they like the service you are offering, they are much more willing to provide personal data such as an email address in return.

Readability: While high quality, useful content is an extremely important element of website usability, do not make the mistake of using too much text in your web design page lay out. Boston web design firms frequently italicize and bold words in paragraphs to make sites easy to skim through so users can quickly located desired content. Break content up and help explain it with images and captions, bullet points, and headings. Remember that content is important, but do not overwhelm your reader with useless or irrelevant information.

Simplicity: The best website designs embrace the mantra, "keep it simple." Use a clean and simple web design that has an apparent structure. Limit the pop ups, videos, and audio features of a site. These can overwhelm users, and without adequate technology, overload their computer and deter them from using your site. Use hierarchical structures to give a sense of visual hierarchy to delineate the content type and importance. Maintain a consistent style in terms of the font, coloring, and structure of each page linking to your site.

Source: Ezine

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