News

Making a Strong First Impression with Your Web Design

Making a Strong First Impression with Your Web Design

You could have the best content in the world, but that won’t do you much good if you’re website doesn’t first make an outstanding first impression. What you have to remember is that your visitors will only spend a few seconds looking over your website. If they don’t instantly like what they see, they’ll move on to your competition. This doesn’t give them enough time to do more than skim a few headings.

While it only takes a second or two for your website to make a first impression, making sure that the first impression is a positive one takes time, planning, and effort.
Several different variables come into play.

Loading Speed

The loading speed of your website is crucial for making a good first impression. The average consumer is growing steadily less patient with slow-loading web pages. While you can’t do anything to influence the speed of the internet connection they are using, you can make sure that your webpage will load as quickly as possible.

The best way to increase your website’s loading speed is using fast-loading plug-ins, moving large images lower on your page, and taking advantage of tools that assess the average loading speed of your page.

White Space is Your Friend

Did you know that white space actually encourages your customers to stick around and read the content you’ve worked so hard to develop?

The last thing your visitors want to do is shift through long paragraphs of dense content. Break up your content and create inviting white space by using headers and subheaders and creating short paragraphs that aren’t more than three or four sentences long. When it comes to blocks of text, less is more.

Contrasting Colors

Contrasting colors make your website inviting and easier to read, however, you don’t want to go too crazy either. Stick to a few basic colors and work out how to use those colors for bullet points, headers, and banners so they draw your visitor’s eyes to your website’s key points.

Sharp Images

Images and videos help your website make a great first impression, but only if those images and videos are high quality and work to enhances your content. The way your images are laid out is also crucial. When done correctly, they should draw the eye to a key piece of content.

These are just a few components that a webpage needs so that it can make a strong first impression.

Contact us to learn how we can help you create an outstanding website that turns first impressions into long-term visitors.

Principles Of Effective Web Design | Modesto Web Design & Development

Principles Of Effective Web Design | Modesto Web Design & Development

modesto web design

In order to use the principles properly, we first need to understand how users interact with websites, how they think, and what are the basic patterns of users’ behavior.

How Do Users Think?

Basically, users’ habits on the Web aren’t that different from customers’ habits in a store. Visitors glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. In fact, there are large parts of the page they don’t even look at.

Most users search for something interesting (or useful) and clickable; as soon as some promising candidates are found, users, click. If the new page doesn’t meet users’ expectations, the Back button is clicked and the search process is continued.

Users appreciate quality and credibility. If a page provides users with high-quality content, they are willing to compromise the content with advertisements and the design of the site. This is the reason why not-that-well-designed websites with high-quality content gain a lot of traffic over years. Content is more important than the design which supports it.

Users don’t read, they scan. Analyzing a web page, users search for some fixed points or anchors which would guide them through the content of the page.

Web users are impatient and insist on instant gratification. Very simple principle: If a website isn’t able to meet users’ expectations, then the designer failed to get his job done properly and the company loses money. The higher is the cognitive load and the less intuitive is the navigation, the more willing are users to leave the website and search for alternatives.

Users don’t make optimal choices. Users don’t search for the quickest way to find the information they’re looking for. Neither do they scan webpage in a linear fashion, going sequentially from one site section to another one? Instead, users are satisfice; they choose the first reasonable option. As soon as they find a link that seems like it might lead to the goal, there is a very good chance that it will be immediately clicked. Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Satisficing is more efficient.

Users follow their intuition. In most cases, users muddle through instead of reading the information a designer has provided. According to Steve Krug, the basic reason for that is that users don’t care. “If we find something that works, we stick to it. It doesn’t matter to us if we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.”

Users want to have control. Users want to be able to control their browser and rely on consistent data presentation throughout the site. E.g. they don’t want new windows popping up unexpectedly and they want to be able to get back with a “Back”-button to the site they’ve been before: therefore it’s a good practice to never open links in new browser windows.

Your website is the front door to your business. MHD Group has provided results-driven website design solutions for hundreds of businesses. The website design must be planned, defined, and executed as a priority in your marketing strategy.

MHD Group provides results driven solutions that elevate brand awareness above the competition, motivate buyers and ensure customer loyalty by effectively integrating branding strategy, graphic and web design, marketing, digital media and public relations.