Many brands compete for audiences' time and attention. Your website is a valuable asset where you can entice new customers with great design. Here are 5 steps to creating a website that holds your audience's attention.
Imagine a customer searches for a product or service like yours. Or, they search for your brand name. Or, maybe, they found your website through social media.
No matter the journey that led a customer to your website, how do you get them to be engaged so that they stay on your website and become a customer?
Websites that are designed well increase that engagement and lead to conversions. Good web design can forever impact how your audience thinks about your brand, so it's important to find a web design company to assist you in transforming your website. There are more than a billion websites on the Internet (that’s a lot of content), so you want your website to be good.
How to Capture Your Audiences' Attention With Web Design
- Simplify Your Design
- Make Sure Your Website Is Accessible
- Increase Your Website Speed
- Maintain Brand Consistency
- Use Colors Strategically
Simplify Your Design
One of the best strategies to capture your audiences’ attention with web design is to simplify it. The best websites have structure. They are clean, simple, and not full of clutter.
Plus, a website that is too busy or overcrowded can get confusing really fast. You want a website that is easy to navigate and easy for the user to take in information. Your audience wants to easily find the content or information they are looking for.
To make sure your website is not cluttered, make whitespace your friend. Whitespace gives your audience a chance to digest what they are reading on a page. It’s not easy to master the art of using whitespace effectively, but to help you get started, use whitespace between graphics, margins, gutters, footers, and columns.
Morales Group’s homepage is a good example of using whitespace effectively:
The different colorful panels help guide website visitors based on their intent. Job seekers and business partners can click on the appropriate panel and be directed to content that’s relevant to them.
Make Sure Your Website Is Accessible
We tend to think of customers as people who can easily walk into a store without a wheelchair, or who can easily access any website. But sometimes we don’t always think about customers who have disabilities, both visible and invisible.
Every single person, no matter their abilities, should be able to access your website. A brick-and-mortar business needs to make sure that it is accessible to individuals with disabilities. Your website needs to do the same.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 61 million Americans have a disability. Disabilities include limited mobility, serious difficulty concentrating, and limited eyesight.
These are people who still need to access your website, so it’s important that you make sure your website is accessible to everyone.
Increase Your Website Speed
Your website needs to load quickly. If customers are not able to see your website right away, they likely won’t wait around for very long. According to a report by Unbounce, 70% of people say page speed affects their purchasing decisions.
A tool like Google PageSpeed Insights helps you determine how fast your website currently loads. In addition, the tool provides you with recommendations for how to make your website load faster.
Website speed is something you should prioritize. One way to help your page speed is to reduce image sizes.
Image sizes are one of the factors that impact page speed. Fortunately, it’s easy to reduce the size of larger and oversized images.
Anything that is over 100KB is considered an oversized image. You can find oversized images on your site by using a tool like Screaming Frog or Beam Us Up.
Once you find your oversized images, compress them to reduce the size of the image by 25% to 75%. A tool like tinyjpeg makes this process easy.
After you compress your images, you can replace them on your website. This should help boost your site speed.
Some other tips to consider if you want to increase your website speed are:
- Enable browser caching
- Uninstall unused plugins
- Upload videos to third-party platforms
A fast-loading website will make customers happy and keep them coming back to your website.
Maintain Brand Consistency on Your Website
Your audience should have a consistent feeling about your brand as they go through your website. That feeling is created when the elements of your website are the same throughout.
These elements include the same color palette across the website and well-designed navigation.
Your audience should have that consistent experience each time they interact with your website.
Use Colors Strategically
Colors are for more than just looks. The decision on what colors to use is important for the design of your website.
Use colors on your website that relate to your brand. Colors are a big component to what makes a website stand out, according to Emma Foley, design lead at Clique Studios.
Foley says, “Once you recognize that as much as you might want them to, everyone is not going to be your audience. So, if you focus on building a strong community of people you want to talk to, you can do a lot with using color as the first interaction with those people.”
Amazon, for example, uses its signature yellow tones from its logo on its website to draw attention to website elements such as the search button and “Sign In” call-to-action button.
Of course, color is not everything. Foley says that while color is significant, it’s only one part of your entire brand story.
Use Web Design to Engage and Retain Customers
You only get one shot at capturing your audience’s attention. And it’s not easy.
When a website works well, not just technically, but also in the design, it will capture the attention of your audience.
There is an overload of content on the Internet — so you want your content to be good. Why create something to show the world if you’re not proud of it? Your content should inspire, should be easy to use, and motivate a customer to interact with your organization.
When web design is done well, it reaches new heights of engagement with your audience, allowing for more effective communication and ultimately, stronger brand loyalty.