Companies want their websites to be attractive and engaging to web users. They often feel that adding a lot of neat visual features and other extras is going to help accomplish this goal. But in reality, there is a careful balancing act to be achieved here. Too much of this stuff can clutter a website and need to underlying crashes or slow load times, so that a large significant portion of an audience either isn’t able to access the site, or becomes irritated or distracted and leaves.
Here are some critical things to think about when contemplating overall web design.
Evaluating Video
Want to have a high-powered video as part of your sales pitch on a landing page? Make sure that it can load well on a variety of browsers, and on a mobile screen. You’ll also want to evaluate questions about bandwidth.
One way to solve some of these problems is by hosting the video on a separate site. YouTube is probably the most common choice. Instead of posting a video on your web server, you can simply embed a YouTube video on your webpage. This gives the customer easy access, but it also ensures that they will be able to easily load the video on YouTube’s robust infrastructure.
Multilayer Forms, Big Graphics and Other Extras
It’s also important to evaluate any other extras that you put onto a website.
Remember the early days of the Internet? While experimenting with what worked for web users, webmasters got carried away with some pretty funky designs. For instance, a lot of webmasters thought it would be great to play music in the background as part of a landing page — it’s easy to code a song into a webpage in HTML, but you almost never see that anymore. Why is that? It’s because, in the vast majority of cases, it became an annoying nuisance for users to deal with. They had trouble turning a song off, or they couldn’t load it right, or it got in the way.
That’s how it is with many other parts of today’s websites, whether it’s multilayer forms, extensive CSS coding, or big banner graphics and slideshows that slow download times or crash a page.
Get the Content Front and Center
What you want to do in web design is get the most important content right in front of the audience. You don’t want them to have to do a lot of work to get where they want to go.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is with smart menus. Make a landing page simple and spare, and lay it out so that people can easily navigate the rest of the site. Hide some of those glitzy extras so that people can click into them if they want, but they’re not confronted with them right away. Make sure that the signposts along the way are clear and easy to understand — and you get a lot more enduring web traffic and visibility for your business.
Let’s forget, many a times, “Less is More”!
Talk to WebSubstance about how to set up your online footprint with most logical design, information architecture and content. We help our client companies to stand out in the crowd and get results they can depend on in a competitive and ever-changing online and e-commerce world.
