Websites can help businesses to achieve sustainable business growth. That said, people expect the websites they frequent to provide a worthwhile experience. The best businesses make it easy for people to locate and engage with content on their website.
Review the following approaches to web design to earn and retain web customers.
Offer Intuitive Navigation
People visit websites to find information, so your website must be easy to navigate. According to research from Clutch, most people say that easy navigation is the most useful feature of a website. For example, moving from the home page to the blog should be intuitive for visitors.
Place your navigation menu and the accompanying search bar in an obvious location atop your home page. Visitors should see the navigation menu as soon as they arrive, and find it the same place on every page of your site.
For example, MailChimp uses a responsive navigation menu that reappears when the blog reader begins to scroll up the page.
Source: MailChimp
By ensuring that navigation is available as needed, MailChimp provides an intuitive and streamlined browsing experience.
Page footers also help visitors to navigate your website in an organic and intuitive fashion. When a visitor reaches the bottom of a page, the footer menu points them to the next section without scrolling.
This promotes engagement, as well as prevents disruption to the browsing experience. And for the people that value on-site links to your company’s social media profiles, a footer menu is the ideal way to further the brand experience.
Use Internal Linking
Internal linking, or linking from one page to another on your site, is vital to helping people find more of your content. For best results, link to the content that’s most relevant within the context of the current page.
To again use MailChimp as an example, they use an internal link in a blog post that mentions customer retention to point readers to a related post that elaborates on the topic.
Businesses that leverage website navigation can create a seamless browsing experience and direct audiences to high-value pages that will increase the chances of conversion.
Optimize Content for Skimming
People are impatient when searching for information online and often skim web content instead of comprehensively read and analyze it. To ensure that people can still meaningfully engage with your web content, you should format your website so that key information is obvious.
It’s best to present information in concise chunks, as a wall of text will repel visitors. This is especially true for mobile users on small screens, who accounted for 52.2% of all web traffic last year.
A few steps to accomplish this include:
● Write content using short sentences
● Shorten your paragraphs.
● Make one point per paragraph.
● Begin each sentence with a noun or verb to best grab the reader’s attention.
Use visual and textual elements to draw attention to the most important information on each page, including:
● Headers and subheaders
● Bolding and italics
● Lists and bullet points
● Images
These serve as “signposts” that highlight the most important information on a page and create a more open and accessible browsing experience. Scannable websites make use of visual hierarchy – or the arrangement of page elements in a way that implies their importance. As much as a text, visual cues act as an unconscious guide to the reader, pointing them to the next most important page element.
For best results, remove visual clutter from your website to promote content consumption and optimize the browsing experience.
Best Web Practices to Grow Your Business Online
Consumers expect a streamlined browsing experience from businesses. Intuitive navigation and scannable content are some of the main factors that contribute to whether people will engage with and return to your company’s website.
SynergyTop can help startups and businesses to create intuitive and search-optimized websites that will help them get noticed in these heavily competitive times.
Write to us at contact@synergytop.com for details!
This blog is enned by Grayson Kemper, a Senior Content Developer for Clutch, a B2B research, ratings, and reviews platform in Washington, D.C. He focuses on emerging technologies research, such as IoT and artificial intelligence companies.
You can find reviews of SynergyTop as one of the best top ecommerce developers in San Diego on Clutch and top web developers in San Diego on The Manifest.
