Website Design Blog. Evoart

Designing a website. Anyone could do that right? Wrong. Creating a decent website concept takes a lot of time, thought and effort. It isn’t just a case of choosing a complementary colour palette, opening up Photoshop and slapping in a logo along with a few boxes for content. Theres much more too it than that. In this concise article Ive put together a list of 10 essential things to consider when your designing.

1. Is the main body copy readable?

Its no surprise that big fonts are easier to read than smaller fonts. It doesn’t take a genius to work that out. However lots of designers still insist on using 10px, or 1em size fonts for the main copy of their websites.

This is an issue that really gets to me, especially on sites where content really is king. Surely its common sense to make the text as readable as possible when the main purpose of your site is to sell something, or get your visitors to read an article?

When we talk about readability some people take it to the extreme. For want of a better example, in my opinion 1.6em is too big for main body copy and a design will suffer because of it, but no one can deny that text that size is very very comfortable to read. I believe common sense is the name of the game here. As long as the copy on your site is comfortable to read then you’ve covered this point.

2. Have you accounted for every item in the brief?

Again common sense, yet sometimes its all too easy to miss something mentioned between the lines. Before you start designing, thoroughly read the brief and ask as many questions as possible. From my experience Ive found that its better to ask a stupid question at this stage than have to drastically rework your design two days later!

Get into the habit of creating bullet points for items that are essential and need to be included in your design. Refer to these as your getting stuck into the design. That way its near impossible to leave something out.

3. Is the ‘Call to Action’ the most prominent feature?

To be honest this wasn’t something I thought much about when I was first getting started with design. Its important that as designers we don’t get ridiculously caught up in the actual look of our work and forget about its purpose. Of course we all want our designs to be ‘CSS Gallery’ material, but not all of them can be. We must not loose sight of the main purpose of a website. Its a business tool to sell a product or a service. This is something Ive come to realise more and more over the last 6 months or so.

With this in mind you have to take off your designers hat and put on your business one. Make sure that your main call to action is the most prominent feature on the page and that just begging to be clicked on!

4. What elements are my eyes drawn too?

Eye tracking is very important when it comes to analysing your websites visitors and what they’re drawn to on each page. Where do their eyes flow through your design? What elements immediately attract the most clicks? These are the kinds of questions that can be easily answered from eye tracking analysis.

When you’re designing you should be thinking about where you want to direct your visitors eyes. Think about it, you’ve got complete control over how a visitor views and perceives the website your designing.

5. Make your design ooze class, professionalism and trust.

Again this is fundamental if your clients site will be selling products and / or a service. Designing a site that evokes the feeling of ‘trust’ is tough to explain. Lets just say that using Pixel fonts doesn’t make a site feel all that professional or trustworthy!

The best way to gauge trust is to ask yourself whether you’d be happy handing over your credit card details to make a transaction? Don’t forget that a nice bit of borrowed credibility can really go a long way. Here are a few examples of ‘Reassurance logos’ that people often look for before doing business online.

6. If possible, add testimonials!

Testimonials always help make a company seem more reputable. Think about how you display them though.

Using a handwritten font can help give testimonials a more authentic look. Testimonials accompanied by a photo of the person who gave them can really provide some solid credibility. If theres a video testimonial, well thats a huge bonus!

I know that if Im about to buy a product from a website, I’ll always look to read a few customer reviews or testimonials. It makes me feel more at ease knowing that others have done business with this company and taken the time to say thanks. If I can’t find them easily, I’ll go elsewhere.

7. Make the right stuff stand out.

Although it can often look shabby, using a light yellow background behind your text has been proven to make it stand out. Thats just one example of making elements in your design ‘pop’ or stand out amongst other design elements.

Of course us Photoshop savy guys can do much more to aid the prominence of particular sections of a site. Subtle gradients, outer glows, shadows and starbursts to name but a few.

When your making the finishing touches to your design you should be able to easily distinguish the most important areas / features on the page whilst standing a few feet away from your monitor.

8. Don’t cram.

Typical ’sales pages’ suffer from this. Cramming a site with content, calls to action, and different coloured backgrounds and text can just send a confusing message to your visitors. Too many elements will be fighting for pole position.

Give your design elements enough room to breathe. Space helps add class and an air professionalism to most designs.

9. What are visitors trying to achieve when they visit?

I don’t think I really need to say much here. What are visitors trying to achieve when they visit the site your designing? Make it as easy as possible for them to achieve this!

10. Design for the users previous experiences

To some extent more and more of the webs users have a set of expectations when they visit a site. They expect certain elements to behave in a particular way, and they expect to find certain information. You should always design with this in mind.

An example of such expectations might be as follows;

• to easily locate the price of a product on an ecommerce site
• to be able to access contact details in a single click
• to receive confirmation or thanks that a form has been sent
• for the navigation to be clear and easily found

… you get the gist.

Final thoughts…

I was inspired to write this article after carrying out some design work for a company who are obsessed (in a good way!) with conversion rates. Working with these guys really opened my eyes to the things us designers forget about. Things that we really need to consider each time we start a new design. Who knows, if more of us took into account these considerations Conversion Rate Experts might be out of a job!

By the way, I highly recommend their ‘101 ways to improve your conversion rate’ article. A fantastic and humorous read!

I hope you found this article useful. Please share you thoughts and ideas in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you.