If you’re tired of hearing “SEO” and “load speed” every time you try to figure out what makes Good website, we’re here to help. Having your site technically optimized is no doubt important for getting the search algorithms to favor it so that it gets brought to new users, it is not the only important thing.
Once the optimized search gets you onto the front of google and the new user enters the site, keeping them engaged and interested in your business becomes the new focus.
There’s a great article by Louisa McGrath from Lucidpress that details some of the intricacies of building trust with consumers in the digital age. While I won’t go into regurgitating her article here, I want to discuss how some of these ideas can be implemented through the website design itself.
The Basics
One way to look at a site is as your most important advertising media out there. The old days of billboard ads being put together as part of a campaign and then torn down for a new one the following week/month/year is over. Uniformity is critical to showing you have a well thought out and mature brand. If every part of your site resembles a different age of your development it will show the customer you are still developing. Trust is something that is harder and harder to come by in the business-consumer relationship, and everywhere you can foster it you should. Throughout all your pages, and site locations, as well as social media, the same colors and fonts should be used. This is the simplest level of uniform branding, but also the most encompassing to bringing a smooth and clean presence to your customer.
Graphics
Beyond the colors and fonts, it is important to have a company digital asset package. There will be different needs for different logos across your digital platforms, but they should be the same. A thumbnail logo in one place should be the same as the thumbnail elsewhere. Depending on backgrounds where the logos are displayed it is often necessary to change the colors, the cleanest way is often to inverse them, so that they still present the same look as elsewhere.
Interface
Going farther of the deep-end of minutia and subconscious, the interface that your customers use should follow a related design style across the website. This includes the way a header menu recesses, or how buttons change dynamically to user movement. It also includes the flow of the site. As you have likely seen across the internet, different sites function differently. The good ones are designed in a way that once you are on them even if not like another site, they are intuitive to how they flow and are used. While I won’t be covering that level of design here (stay tuned for future posts), having that flow be the same, or at least complementary across the site is one more way that will build trust with the user. These are all little subconscious parts of how someone interacts with a site (and brand) that influences whether or not they will stick around. Much like how a retailer like Target operates in the physical space. No matter what Target you are at, even though they are setup differently, once you know one, you can figure out how to navigate any, and no matter where you are in the country, or world, they all look the same with the same logos, branding and materials.
