Woman designing a website

Effective Web Design – The Three Things You Can’t Afford To Ignore.

Posted by Cucumber Helen |

Your website is on a mission. Its role is  multidimensional — to support your brand, to assist your marketing efforts, and to facilitate your sales processes (even if you are not selling anything on your website, you are still “selling yourself”).

In the world where our attention span is shrinking year over year, and the amount of information we receive online is growing at an astounding rate, how do we keep people interested? How do we share our information in a way so that people actually read it, and react to it? And since most our information is shared online these days – how do achieve that through web design?

First off, here are some intriguing statistics of our attention span vs internet behaviour:

  • The average attention span in 2000 – 12 seconds
  • The average attention span in 2013 –  8 seconds
  • Percent of page views that last less than 4 seconds – 17 %
  • Percent of page views that lasted more than 10 minutes  – 4 %
  • Percent of words read on web pages with 111 words or less – 49 %
  • Percent of words read on an average (593 words) web page – 28 %

What does this data tell us and how can we use it for effective web design?

Simplicity

Web design and navigation cannot afford to be complicated these days. If your customers have to make more than 3 clicks to get  to the point they were looking for, they are simply are not going to do that.

Brevity

With only 8 seconds to spare, what are the 3 most important things your customers must learn from your website’s homepage? Keep your message simple, your website’s navigation intuitive (not more than 5 items in your main menu), and your services descriptions fast to understand.

Try to avoid lengthy explanations of who you are and what your mission statement is. Your visitors will get your brand on an intuitive emotional level, if you are truly living your brand’s core values.

Variety

Keep things interesting on your website; use visuals, colours, and typography that will liven up the overall design. It doesn’t have to be too loud or too colourful, just little accents would keep your visitors awake, and attentive.

So there. 406 words on web design.

If you are reading this sentence right now, then your attention span is definitely higher than 8%.

Congratulations! And thanks for reading!