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5 Tips for Building a Website That Customers Love

Many businesses worry about the design of their website, and if it’s polished and appealing enough to present to the public.

This is because they understand that the quality of their website can impact their image. It’s the first-impression that can influence whether a viewer is converted into a customer or not.

“A well-designed website not only keeps a new visitor on the page, but it also sparks their curiosity to explore and learn more,” says Sabrina Edwards, a customer support agent at ViralUpgrade.

Feeling uncertain about your website? This article will go over five tips for building one that your customers will love.

1. Keep it simple

The worst thing that a website can do is confuse and disorient a viewer. If it’s unclear how to navigate around its pages, then it’s time to make some drastic changes.

It’s best to think of page layout in terms of hierarchies of importance. When visiting a page, what information is the viewer most likely seeking out? Whatever that might be, it should be the most evident and obvious element on the page.

Let’s say that it’s the homepage for a local store. The most vital pieces of information should be the name of the business, location, phone number, email address, hours that it’s open, and a clear description of the services it provides. None of these things should be buried under superfluous clutter like photo slideshows or social media widgets.

Thomas Jones, a customer support agent at ViralRace, told me that “you want a website that, through the clarity of its presentation, quickly answers the most basic questions a customer might have.”

2. Choose your colors carefully

There’s something called the Von Restorff effect that often gets discussed when selecting colors for your website. This is a theory that states, in simple terms, that anything that’s different will stand out from a crowd that’s mostly the same.

What does this have to do with choosing colors?

Well, some will argue and try to convince you that there are certain colors that are more likely to catch a viewer’s eye. They might tell you that utilizing red is the key to getting more conversions based on A/B tests they’ve conducted.

However, this isn’t quite the case. The truth is that effective color choice is more context-sensitive than anything. If you have a website that’s mostly green, then the few elements that are red are obviously going to stand out. The same goes for a situation where it's visa versa. Meanwhile, if everything's the same color, then it’s all going to blend in and be forgettable.

In other words, the colors themselves don’t matter. It’s how they contrast that’s far more significant. So don’t ever feel obligated to follow any “professional” suggestions on this subject.

To bring back the idea of hierarchies, you should code colors based on the types of interactions you want to elicit from your viewer. If it’s an important part that you want them to click, then it should be in a color that makes it stand out from the rest.

3. Make your headlines concise

If you were asked what the most viewed items on a web page were, what would be your first guess?

Many people would assume that it’s the images. After all, everybody talks about how visually oriented we all are. Yet, this isn’t the case.

According to some studies, headlines actually tend to be that part that attracts most people’s eyes at first. This is because upon opening a page, most people are actively searching for the parts that will inform them what it’s about. Images actually tend to get passed over during this process.

That means you should put extra effort into writing your headlines. Make them bold, informative, and straight to the point. Anything too long-winded or muddled will make them feel lost. That’s why a lot of webpages these days tend to be focused around a single giant headline in the center, with smaller subheadings below that go into more specific information.

4. Improve readability with white space

A common problem that viewers have with poorly designed websites is an inability to comprehend what they’ve read. That’s due to the fact that they rarely have enough whitespace surrounding the text.

When a web designer talks about whitespace, they’re referring to the blank, unmarked areas of the page. These spaces give the text the room to breathe, and can be used to draw attention to important parts of the page.

A website with barely any whitespace is suffocating to look at. Your eye isn’t sure where to look, as all of the elements are crowded up against each other. These distractions make it hard to retain any information. Even adding just a bit of padding around objects on the page will do a lot to improve its intelligibility.

So please, use whitespace to bring balance, coherence, and harmony to your website.

5. Speed up the loading times

Do you remember the pain of dial-up internet? How some websites used to load at an agonizing snail’s pace?

Yeah, nobody wants to be reminded of those dark ages. That’s the same pain everybody feels, though, when they come across a slow website. It’s enough to make user satisfaction drop by 3.8 percent, and even increase lost revenue per user by 4.3 percent. Yeesh, that’s no good.

You can alleviate this pain by optimizing your website. Try to keep your pages down to only the necessary elements, and enable caching to reduce loading times. Also, don’t be afraid to fork over some extra cash for premium hosting.

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