When you create a website you do so with your own vision in mind. Your site often reflects your personal tastes from the layout or look to the text, but how many times do you stop and ask yourself what the end-user, i.e. your customer, would appreciate, deem helpful, or find appealing?
Website design doesn’t have to include a bunch of flash animation or a dizzying array of colors. What it does have to have is a cohesive, easy on the eyes over-all look. The way you lay everything out should be visually appealing, user friendly and easy to navigate.
Psychology & Convenience
Some of the web design process is a foray into psychology. For instance, blue is a color many businesses choose because it subliminally enhances customer trust. It’s also common knowledge the most important information you are presenting should be “above the fold” (the area of a website that first appears on your screen before you have to scroll down) so it has a better chance of being seen before the user clicks away.
If your prospect or customer cannot easily find what they are looking for, or they are squinting to read white text on a black background, they may never return to your site. Same goes if you have a large video file that bogs down or crashes their computer while it’s trying to load. The point of having a website is engagement so everything you put on yours should do well to engage and appeal to the end-user so they stay with you (and your site) longer.
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SEO & Images
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a mysterious thing if you don’t understand it, but it’s important if you want people to find and use your website. Unfortunately, most people don’t know the key to effective SEO goes beyond whatever text is on their site. It’s true! Key words and phrases also apply to images and many website owners neglect creating the proper Alt Tags and titles necessary for search engines. In addition, images — from infographics to product pictures (or even shots around the office), can be incredibly helpful to a prospective customer when they are in the “shopping” phase of the buying process.
As they say at Stephen Dent Design:
“If you have a great website, but no one knows that it exists there isn’t much point in having one.”
Images Make it Pinteresting
With the astronomical success and constant growth of sites like Pinterest, websites that neglect using and properly tagging images are missing out. In fact having images on your site that users can (and will) share or re-pin will increase your chances of being found and drive more traffic for years to come. Some of today’s most well-known businesses are successfully using images because great images go viral on sites like Pinterest and they can easily provide you with the coveted SEO growing ”backlink” to your site a thousand times over.