The only way to showcase your business in front of a broad audience is to create a highly attractive and functional website that becomes an online business entity. It helps viewers find your business through online searches, familiarize with your business and brand and even engage with it to realize their search objective. Since more and more consumers are searching online to find resources for fulfilling their needs, high online visibility of a business is a basic requirement to draw consumers towards it.
Creating attractive websites is the first step in bringing consumers closer to your business and arouses their interest to explore the website. The next step is to sustain viewers’ interest so that they spend a long time on the website and get more opportunities to engage with your business.
Websites are critical in generating online engagement, essential for generating leads and conversions that bring in revenue. Therefore, a lot depends on the website design that can make or break businesses. Creating attractive websites is not enough if it does not have features to support all-around business activities like the websites created by Online Impact 360.
In addition, websites help make the most important first impressions that influence the viewer’s perception about your business, originating from the website design. Since most of the credibility of your business emanates from the website design, it acquires utmost importance in planning any online marketing campaign.
The website design conveys your brand’s personality, and to enhance its appeal to your audience, you must stick to the 7 principles of design to create the desired appeal.
Maintain visual hierarchy
The attractiveness of any web page depends on how well you maintain the visual hierarchy. The principle of visual hierarchy demands that you establish a focal point of the design, an area where you want viewers to pay maximum attention.
So, first, prioritize the various design elements like size, color, contrast, direction and alignment, texture and style, white space, and repetition by referring to your business objectives so that viewers can catch a glimpse of them. Then, by skillfully manipulating the design elements, you can ensure that people pay attention to things in the way you want.
Keep it simple
To create forceful designs that leave high impacting and long-lasting first impression, keep the design simple. In this regard, follow Hick’s Law that suggests that offering more choices to viewers will only prolong the decision. When viewers have too many options, it becomes difficult for them to navigate through the crowded place.
If you have too many products to showcase, then instead of showcasing all the products on the home page, use a filter and display it prominently so that users can effectively narrow down their searchers and make fast decisions.
Follow Fitt’s Law
User experience matters most in web design. Always try to provide the best user experience. While designing websites, keep in mind that you must make things easier for users to feel comfortable navigating the website. Refer to Fitt’s Law that considers the time taken by users to move a pointer to the target, like moving the mouse from one place to the next spot you want to click.
By dividing the distance to the target by the size of the target, you can determine the time it takes to move the mouse. When both parameters are high, the time taken is higher, and users feel strained to act. Maintaining the proper ratio between the buttons on the screen for the screen size should help find the sweet spot.
Consider the viewing pattern of images
Placing images strategically helps to gain maximum attention. However, to understand the right way of putting pictures, you must consider how viewers move their eyes across an image in a defined manner. Divide the image into four quadrants and number it 1,2,3,4 that starts with the top left-hand quadrant and moves in a clockwise direction.
The eyes start roving from the first quadrant when gazing on images with the maximum attention given to the first quadrant (41%) and then 20%, 25%, and 14% in the remaining quadrants in that order. The knowledge should help designers to intricately position content/images according to importance by choosing the right quadrants.
Facilitate viewing at a glance
A good design rests on the six pillars of a good figure, proximity, similarity, continuation, closure, and symmetry. All these parameters help to create a complete image by assimilation of the various parts in the design so that viewers can get a comprehensive view of the assembly and quickly figure out at a glance the element that they are looking for.
Thus, by proper synthesis of the elements, it is possible to create an excellent design for the website that holds high appeal to viewers not only for its aesthetics but also because of the pleasure of easy viewing.
White space
While too many design ideas might seem quite inviting to use, be selective in using these to avoid cramming that can cause distraction and spoil the design. Remember that your goal is to keep it as simpler as possible, and it is better to consider leaving ample white spaces in the design that give some relief to the eyes and help concentrate on the crucial design aspects. Leaving enough white space helps to create a clean design that communicates the message. Use images judiciously to maintain the proper balance in design.
Provide minimal but useful information
By sticking to the principles of maintaining simplicity in the design, you must be careful to provide as little and essential information that serves your purpose to drive home the message. Avoid bombarding people with information that can be too much to digest and create confusion.
Spread the information widely across several pages so that you can avoid overload of information on any single page. Instead, provide concise and valuable information on the landing page/home page that is enough to describe your business in the best way.
Although there is some overlap, you must use each step to create the most effective web design.
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