The user experience should always be your priority while designing a website. From ensuring responsiveness to optimizing its speed, here are some of the most effective ways to ensure a good user experience while building a business website.
Make Sure It is Responsive
Most internet users these days use smartphones as their primary devices for browsing the net. Hence, when setting up the website, you will have to take that fact into account and ensure a responsive design.
Responsiveness allows the website to adjust to any screen that it is being viewed on. With it, you can arrange the layout and the elements in your website to be viewed differently on different screen sizes or devices.
So it does not matter whether your user is on a 6-inch smartphone, a 17-inch laptop, or a 40-inch smart television. Because of the responsive design, your company website will adjust itself accordingly. This allows users to have a comfortable view of the website irrespective of the device they are on. And that in turn will allow you to retain your users, or customers if you are running an eCommerce website.
The Bootstrap framework is the ideal choice for responsiveness. It is widely used and accepted as a standard across different browsing platforms. Besides, in terms of cross-browser compatibility, most browsers support the latest Bootstrap version, usually a few months into its release.
Thus, even while using the latest version of the framework, you can rest assured that your users’ browsers can interpret the framework appropriately.
Use a Creative but Simple Layout
You might think that creativity and simplicity do not go hand in hand, but that is not the case. At least in the case of website design, these two fit in just fine.
The problem with getting too creative with your design is that not everyone will feel comfortable with it. When you make it difficult for your users to navigate through the website, they will not be coming back for a second time. This is especially applicable in the case of eCommerce websites, but it also applies to regular websites and landing pages.
When you are designing, you should start with a rather simple layout. Keep the menu bar where most users expect it to be. Then, move on to the main content of the website.
Give this some special attention if you are designing an eCommerce platform. In that case, you must make sure that your product pages are displaying information related to the available stock, price, buying and payment options, and so on.
Once you get the basics right, you can start work on the creative aspect of your website. Usually, the design incorporates the company colors or shades that fall in that range.
Avoid colors that are too flashy, unless they are part of your company logo or color scheme. Either way, the colors and overall design elements in the website should complement the layout. Do not let creativity overpower the layout and usability aspect of your website.
Utilize Various Widgets and APIs
The best thing about widgets and APIs is that you do not need to allocate space on your website to accommodate them. You also need not worry about a decline in website loading speed. Widgets and APIs are usually set up using a few lines of code pulled from the developer’s website or platform. That means you are simply forming a link to that application while using it on your platform.
For your business website, you can set up a free weather widget. It can provide users with location-based weather forecasts. These weather widgets are very accurate in terms of delivering real-time forecasts utilizing radar data. Hence, your users can see visual reports related to rain, temperature, humidity, and various other weather parameters for various locations.
Ecommerce websites will need to include payment gateways. These are a bit more complicated to set up given that there is the case with security and bank details. However, the complications you will face are just for getting approval for setting up the gateway. The setup itself is not that difficult to do, and the payment gateway developers will hand you a step-by-step guide on how you can do it.
Optimize Your Images
You can optimize your images by setting up a CDN – Content Delivery Network – where the images are hosted on a different site and are simply linked to yours. Besides, you can also use image optimization programs to get them in a size.
This is something you would want to do as it will significantly improve your website loading speed. Your users will not wait for more than 3 seconds for the entire website to load. Hence, you must not use images that are too large and take a long time to load.
That is all for this article. Incorporating these practices will help you build a website that delivers a proper user experience, something that your users or customers will highly appreciate.
