10 Ways to Get an Attractive Web Design and Development

Web design and development hints can be found in abundance online. Various opinions exist regarding the optimum design for a website. This is due to the fact that design is, in some ways, subjective. What one individual finds appealing, another may find repulsive.

Web design and development are one of the most crucial elements for a website's success at the same time. In fact, approximately 50% of consumers indicate that their first criterion for determining a company's credibility is the website's design. As a result, it also has an impact on bounce rate, conversions, and other factors.

Ah, if only there were a way to locate some impartial information on how to produce effective site design. Ah, there it is! And this page has accumulated a lot of it. Read on for some web design and development guidance backed by science. Stop going with your intuition and start acting on things that have been shown to work.

Science-based Web Design and Development Tips to Magnetic Your Customers

You can discover some research-based advice on how to enhance your website design in the paragraphs that follow.

1. Prioritize Site Speed Above All Else

The importance of speed in web design is arguably one of the topics that receive the least discussion. It has an impact on every area of business, including bounce rate, user satisfaction, conversions, and revenue, according to a study.

Effects of Website Speed on Web Design and Development

If your website is excessively slow, visitors will quit it soon. Additionally, because users care, so do search engines, which include your page's loading speed into their rankings. You must make every effort to make your website as quickly as possible because of this.

Whether the fold still exists is a hotly contested topic. Some contend that the availability of so many various screen sizes today renders the fold obsolete. A few folks have different opinions.

People still spend 57 percent of their time above the fold in 2018, with a dramatic fall subsequently. The first two screenfuls receive 74% of their attention.

2. Utilize the Fold's Web Design and Development Advice

The fold therefore appears to be still important. To keep readers on your website, you must prioritise your content and make the most of the available real estate. Here are some guidelines for accomplishing that:

Use a title that is concise and informative — Describe what your website can achieve for visitors and emphasise the advantages. Use strong words and keep it short. Take a look at our copywriting suggestions for extra guidance.

Specify your main call to action — To improve conversion rates, the user journey should start above the fold. Ensure that your CTA is clear and easy to see.

3. Benefit from Hick's Law

According to Hick's Law, people will take longer to decide if they have more options.

There is great research on these phenomena where shoppers were given more or less jam options to sample. In the end, people with more options were substantially less likely to make a purchase of jam than those with fewer options.

Hicks Law Web Design Tips

What relevance does that have to your web design and development? Because you might be able to increase your conversions by simply giving users fewer options. Here are a few illustrations of how that might appear:

Keep the menu options to a minimum.
Less form fields
Limit your calls to action to one.

Keep each page focused on a single goal and only display social media buttons for the networks you actively use.

There are many more ways to simplify user navigation on your website and point users in the direction of the choices you really want them to make. In fact, there is an ebook on the subject.

4. Keep it Simple

Keeping with the less is more principle, this also holds true for your overall design. Visitors dislike visual complexity, according to a significant Google study. The main point is that people are less likely to find your design to be beautiful the more complicated it is.

How does that affect your web design and development? Along with the previous point, consider the following:

Reconsider the sidebar – More and more websites are switching to single-column designs in place of the sidebar (for example, the one you are on right now). Fewer interruptions and a clearer focus on the subject result.

Maintain standard site designs – People enjoy the familiarity and can become uncomfortable with non-standard site layouts. Therefore, sticking with established design cliches and layouts can be a good choice. You can still come up with different strategies to stand apart.

5. Avoid accordions, sliders, carousels, and tabs

Webmasters adore carousels. It's likely one of the most frequently asked-for features. Unfortunately, the research suggests that they are not very successful.

The most astounding information comes from Notre Dame University. There, the webmaster discovered that a carousel's initial slide attracted nearly 90% of the clicks while the others were mainly disregarded.

Carousel Slider CTR Web Design and Development Tips

90 percent! It doesn't sound like the additional slides are really necessary. It appears that web designers who discourage their clients from utilising sliders were right to do so from the start.

The same issue that sliders and carousels have is that tabs and accordions are frequently disregarded. The fact that few visitors really read the entire page adds to this. Since most individuals only skim, it is unlikely that they will click more times to view your material.

6. Prioritize Scrolling Over Clicking

How then do you convey information if you don't compress it into sliders and/or accordions? The solution is to simply put everything—including the items that are often hidden—on one big page. It really does work.

Crazy Egg has a fantastic case study that demonstrates this. They went from having a straightforward, condensed sales page to one that was 20 times longer.

Users appear to enjoy scrolling a lot more than clicking. Therefore, if you now disperse the details of your product across numerous pages, it's time to think again.

7. Draw Focus with Visual Cues

One of the core goals of web design is to enable consumers to be directed. You can achieve this by focusing attention in the desired directions by assigning different weights to distinct items. However, you may also accomplish this with more overt visual clues.

One way is by making use of people's propensity to glance in the same direction as those they see in advertisements.

Direct Visual Attention

Compared to when the baby was staring at the camera, have you noticed how more people are reading the text in the image above? This is a genuine thing, and you can use it to focus visitors' attention where you want it most on your website.

You don't need to be particularly subtle, though, to direct visitors' attention. It can be beneficial to be direct on occasion. For instance, in one experiment, researchers compared the results to a basic arrow pointing towards objects to see which impact was more effective.

8. Use people in your images (But Avoid Stock Photos)

It's typically a good idea to incorporate other people in your website's images, aside from using them to capture attention. Both offline and online, individuals like to connect with one another. It's the reason why, for instance, blogs include about pages.

One of Basecamp's case studies illustrates this. When they switched from a text-based landing page to one featuring a sizable photo of a person in the backdrop, they were able to raise their conversions by 102.5 percent.

Use Human Beings as Website Imagery

Simple but powerful. One warning, though: stock photographs can easily undo the entire impression. We are particularly good at identifying and tuning out these generic visuals, according to a Nielsen Norman Group study.

Images in Stock Eye Tracking

Because of this, if you plan to utilise photographs of individuals on your website, make sure they are real and authentic. Include your workforce or clients. Simply refuse stock.

9. Use the Right List Order

It's a terrific idea to use lists, both ordered and unordered, to make information easier to reach. It turns out that human attention is erratic in this situation as well.

This is due to what is known as the serial-position effect. In essence, it asserts that the items at the beginning and end of a list are the ones you are most likely to recall. On the other hand, the middle part is often ignored.

Website Design Advice: Serial Position Effect

The takeaway from this is to make sure to place the most significant qualities where they are most likely to have an impact when listing your product's or service's traits.

10. Make Use of Social Proof

Our final piece of advice for web design is concerning the alleged conformity bias. People have the propensity to act in a similar manner to others. That implies that others are more likely to agree with something if a group of individuals does.

Including social proof on your website is one method to make use of this. If you can show that other people share that viewpoint, new visitors are more likely to have a favourable impression of your website, content, product, or service.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is via figures for social media shares, media mentions, and/or testimonials. We have an entire essay for you to read if you want to learn more about this subject.

Rundown

Web design and development, a challenging subject, has a significant impact on the success of your website. Consequently, it is essential to know what you are doing. A great way to ensure that is to use research as a source of guidance.

The aforementioned methods can be utilised to increase the effectiveness of your websites, enhance the visitor experience, and boost conversion rates and other website success metrics. At Kodehash, get a fully customised website for your business.