Today, a website is very much at the centre of a business and it can be tempting to ‘throw everything at it’ and include literally all the ‘bells and whistles’. While we might want it to look as sleek and modern as possible with lots of interactive sections and glorious graphics, simplicity is often the best route.
The issue here is that, while we might love our organisation and be incredibly proud of it, wanting to show it off in all its glory, we need to think about our customers and clients. Who are they and what do they want from the website? For instance, it’s not the best idea to create a cutting edge modern website aimed at potentially older visitors or, on the other hand, a sombre simple offering for students.
Website design it is a daily juggle of function and design. We know that a website has to look engaging but it’s also got to work and function efficiently. Generally, it only takes somebody 15 seconds on a website before they are tempted to click off. This means you don’t have long at all to capture someone’s attention. The fewer distractions the better.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that not everyone will be looking at your shiny new website on a large screen, so any design should work on mobiles and tablets as well. According to figures from Statista, mobile now accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. In the second quarter of 2020, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 51.53% of global website traffic.
Interestingly, due to low infrastructure and financial restraints, many emerging digital markets skipped the desktop internet phase entirely and moved straight onto mobile internet via smartphone and tablet devices. India is a prime example of a market with a significant mobile-first online population. Other countries with a significant share of mobile internet traffic include Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. In most African markets, mobile accounts for more than half of the web traffic while, by contrast, mobile only makes up around 40% of online traffic in the US.
Also, before you do go off and decide to design a truly unique website experience, it’s worth bearing in mind that we are now used to a fairly standardised website layout. This could apply to other scenarios. If you’re sharing a meal with a friend at their house and offer to lay the table, you’ll expect to find knives and forks in a cutlery drawer for instance, not randomly hidden on a shelf.
When it comes to websites, we look for the home page button in a particular place, we know where the menu should be and where the ‘contact us’ button is likely to be found. If you decide to reinvent the wheel at this point, then you’ll probably lose potential customers who don’t have the time to negotiate your reimagined idea of how a website should function.
People are creatures of habit after all and instinctively look in the places where they expect to find things. Visitors to your website will not have the time or the patience to hunt for things in places where they don’t expect them to be.
If you’d like to know more about how Lake Solutions can support you when designing your new website, then get in touch.