Keeping your website visitors on your site and also having them come back will be contingent on some crucial factors. These factors have to be taken into consideration when building and designing your website. All these factors when blended into one makes for a website which visitors would frequent regularly.
Here they are:
Mobile Friendly
Having a mobile friendly website is a must nowadays. These days most website visitors will access your site from their smartphones or other electronic devices they have. As a website owner, you have the responsibility to build a website which is mobile compatible and responsive. When a visitor accesses your website from a mobile device, the screen layout should automatically adjust to fit the screen been used. This responsiveness is a mark of a good website and will make your visitors trust you.
Load Time
Website visitors expect a site to load immediately the address in clicked on or typed into a new tab. They also expect that the response time between clicking your website or pressing the enter button after typing the site address should be 2 seconds or even less. Any website which takes longer than this expected time is sure to lose visitors. Waiting for a website to load is a guaranteed way to lose your visitors and not have any return visitors either. They best way to resolve this is to optimize your images so they load faster on your website.
Content
This is the name of the game. While been mobile friendly and load time are crucial to a good website design, the content your website offers is what will make your visitors stay or return to your site. If you are a retail store, most visitors to your site will want to see fresh content that relates to current activities. E,g. Christmas holidays, website visitors would expect some form of content to reflect this. Another arm of content is the type of language used on your website. It should have the ability to convert your website visitors to customers depending on what kind of business you are into.
Purpose of your Website
This question must be answered by you. What is your purpose? If you are a business say, bakery, then a visitor to your website must be able to recognise this purpose upon visiting the site. This purpose must be clearly stated from the content you have on the site. Your pages should be clear and reflect this purpose. There should be no confusion in the mind of your website visitor as to what you are about. This is the individual specific purpose which applies to different website owners but there are some general purpose which applies to all website owners. This purpose are; Generating traffic for your website, build your reputation, describe your expertise and sales plus after care. This purpose is reflected in every good website design.
Navigation
This singular factor is enough to turn any website visitor away from your site. Your website might have great content, follow it’s purpose, be mobile friendly or load at the speed of light but all this will amount to nothing if visitors find it difficult to move around your site. Navigation is key to a good website design. Following a bestreviews.guide, if your website visitors find your site difficult to navigate, they will head over to another site to get the information or make the purchase they need. Navigation should be simple and consistent. It should also be so on every page on your website.
Pattern Reading should be F-Shaped
In the west, reading follows from the left to the right, from the top to the bottom. This is the natural reading pattern which the eyes follow as the eyes see the top and left part of a screen, with most people. So, this follows that you should keep all relevant content within this area of your website as that is where most people would concentrate on. A good website design will follow that natural way the eyes track a website.
Grid Based Layout
Organizing the content on your website is a must. The best way to achieve a good website design is to follow a grid based layout. This layout structures your content in a clean way, balancing your columns, ensuring sections follow each other, there is order to your website when viewed by the eyes, all coming together to form a virtually appealing website.
Keeping it Simple
Knowing that your website might be the only way by which people interact with you or know about you, most website owners might feel compelled to create a Jackson Pollock with their websites. This is not advisable as keeping things simple is the way to go towards achieving a great user experience with your website. Some standards to follow while creating a simple website is;
Colour – ensure the colour isn’t garish or to ‘loud’ for the eyes. E.g. using all red. Try out colours which are a bit muted but no dull. Also ty to keep the number of your colours to 5. If you must increase this number ensure it comes together in a perfect combination.
Pictures or Graphics – keep your pictures simple and make them just enough to past across your message. Some might say there is nothing like to many pictures but depending on what your business is about; your website visitors might get tired if the pictures are to many. This also applies to graphics.
Font
A maximum combination of 3. Any number higher than this will make visitors disengage from your website. trying to read different fonts maybe on different pages will see visitors to your site sticking to just the font they prefer, and most likely ignore your other pages.
These are just some of the factors website owners should consider when designing their website. It should be a guide as your user experience depends on how these factors are properly put together to form your website.