Did you know it only takes 0.05 seconds (50 milliseconds) for users to form an opinion about your website?
The design of your website should always be up to date to stay in competition with your competitors.
If those statistics alone do not convince you, in this blog we will be explaining from our over 15 years experience in web development as a company, The Best Practices For Web Design In 2020
Colour is the most important aspect in branding and marketing because it is where a user builds its first opinion on the website. Colours are more than just a visual aid because colours convey emotion and feeling.
When choosing a colour scheme there are multiple factors you need to take into consideration. What is the audience targeted at? What is appropriate for the website you are designing?
It is difficult to come to a decision on the colour of your branding, however you always want to make it consistent. When a website is consistent it improves the customer experience and builds loyalty.
Design consistency is the act of keeping all of your website the same throughout the entire site. This encompasses everything in the design of the page (font + colours etc). While this seems easy enough to achieve, it is another one of those examples in life where it is much easier said than done.
The entire content binds the visuals of your website. These need to consistent. You’ll want to create the page so the most important things are larger than the less important things. Use the same colour in all the pages. Padding, margins, font, font size, etc, need to be consistent in all elements. Everything should be ordered in a certain width, and should not break the width.
Now that you have your visuals out of the way, make sure everything functions consistently. Do the forms and buttons throughout your website all work the same way? If you have a multi-step form, do all of the boxes function the same? These are important things to double check.
When you browse to a website do you get bored by paragraph after paragraph of text? Do you ever switch websites because it has so much text it doesn't actually get to the point?
The current trend for websites in 2020 is to try and use shorter sentences, they are there for your advantage. Too much text will make the user not know where to start reading and stop them from being able to digest all the information on the page.
It is ok to use long paragraphs, however mix it up and try different types of ways to style how it is output. Don't make boring blank text paragraph after paragraph.
Another key content feature is the type of font used on your website to suit the target audience. You wouldn't pick comic sans for a lawyer firm site but you might if it is a website aimed at kids. However, keep in mind the font size used when creating the pages. It is recommended to have a global stylesheet where all font size matches to keep consistency.
Adding video / images to your website will enable you to improve the visual aspect of your website and increase user satisfaction. Benefitting from a better user experience overall. The human brain can interpret media in almost half the time that they can interpret text. Furthermore The human brain naturally prefers to look at pictures so it will intrigue the user into staying on the website.
There is no point of having a very creative and exciting website, if your viewers are unable to use it and navigate around it to find all of the important information they are searching for. Navigation is best understood as the method in which you explore and move around the website.
Making the page navigation clear to understand will increase consumer satisfaction and make them want to come back for more. Clients should not need to spend time looking for the pages/information they need to get to, it should be clearly laid out. Navigation should assist the user in finding all the information they are after.
According to Google rankings, 80% of the top websites are optimized for mobile devices. That’s because mobile web surfing is becoming the new normal.
57% of people will not recommend a website to others if the website is poorly optimised for mobile. You need to prioritise marketing and promotion over anything else in your website to increase customer awareness.
A mobile friendly website is not only essential for the user experience, but it’s important for SEO purposes as well.
Each time you add an element to your site, especially images, videos, and other complex media files, your loading times can be affected.
Slow loading times lead to a higher leaving quantity. You can’t ignore this. If your pages take too long to load, it’s going to be a major problem.
If your page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% of people will abandon the website and go to another website. This is called a website Bounce, You want your website to have the lowest bounce rate possible for your website.
What is Conversion and why do you need it? Each website has a purpose, this purpose could be to contact the business, purchase a product or submitting a form. Conversion is when one of these purposes has been completed. The percentage of total visitors that convert is called your conversion rate. An average conversion rate is 11.3%.
Call's to action are an essential part of any website, you want your CTA buttons to stand out and be unique. These buttons need to contrast to the colour scheme
You want to have CTA buttons/menus in the Header/Footer as-well as in inner content of the page, this enables the user to not have to search for the CTA making the page more user friendly.
The transfer path of the CTA buttons need to be fluent and simple, They need to not take the user to loads of different pages and try not to have a massive form for the user to fill out as this could potentially stop the user from filling it out.
Overall, there are many practices you need to revise to having a successful website. Your web design choices will ultimately impact whether or not your site is successful.
It doesn’t matter if your website is brand new or if it’s been around for a decade. These are the web design best practices that you need to follow in 2020.
Do you need help with the best web design practices or web design? Contact us.
