Taking Chris Brogan’s advice to be brief, my goal with this post is to be short and sweet.
Recently, I had to complete a website audit for a local company and make recommendations on how they could improve their website. It was an interesting experience because I picked up many neat tricks and tips that I would never have learned since I have no experience in web graphic design. The central message to this all – beauty is everything in web design.
- Visuals are fantastic but using lots of images can be ineffective without captions. Apparently, our attention gets drawn away from the body of the text to the images but is then quickly lost without any caption tie in the picture and direct our attention back to the body.
- Bullets make your information-delivery crisp and easy to consume.
- Keep your fonts simple. Stylish fonts apparently confuse us!
- Don’t information overload: keep one page limited to about two screenfuls of info.
- Put your most important information at the top! Everything at the bottom gets scanned over.
- Animations and sounds are things of the past – they clutter and confuse.
- Never use more than one exclamation point! (This made me slightly sad. I love !!! but apparently they scream ‘amateur’ and exude desperation. Point taken.)
There is a wealth of knowledge out there on how to take your website to the next level. This list doesn’t even begin to skim the surface so I encourage you to go out there, explore, and learn!
Very interesting post as we are learning how to increase the website traffic for the client.
I was quite surprise to not have stylish font, which may confuse audience. Becaeu I thought thats how the web design works!
Using a unique logo and stylish font is what attract people to view the website.
Also, animation and sound are not too good of a way for the web design? Very interesting, however, personally I would like to see many pictures or flash on the website that will entertain me! It may take some time to load huge pictures or may cause computer to run slower, which annoys us so it is understandable to not have many animations to keep people visiting to the website.
I definitely agree with your comments, Christina,
Some companies seemed to be lost when it comes to visualization of the websites.
Visuals do matter, without a doubt. But, having too many, like you said, is ineffective.
Visuals are good for grabbing customers’ attention. But, too much of it can distort them from the information we are trying to communicate. I really like Joey’s Restaurant’s website. I feel that they have just the right amount of image and text.
I also like websites with videos as pictures are somewhat limited in providing the full scope of how the restaurant looks.
Check it out when you have time!