If a new website is being created, there are several objectives that the web design must meet. Some are relatively easy to achieve and are obvious the second you land on a website designed professionally. A prime example is the objective of making the website easy to navigate to provide the best possible user experience, which is achieved via the menu on the home page. For Users, For SEO, Or Both? Many objectives of a website are related to user experiences, such as having high-quality content, a visually appealing appearance, and the functionality of the website being fit for purpose in the sense that everything on the website works as it should. Other objectives within a website’s design will specifically relate to SEO and the goal of the website being ranked highly on search engines, with the prime one being Google. To hopefully encourage Google to rank a website highly, onsite SEO, such as metadata, internal linking, and effective keyword use throughout the content, will all help. There are also some objectives that web designers will be expected to enable when creating a website that satisfies both the desire for a good user experience and SEO. Here, there is a crossover because many ways you create great user experience are integral to optimising a website to satisfy Google’s ranking factors. Fast Versus Slow Page Load Speed One such factor is page load speed, which is how quickly any page within a website opens when someone clicks on it. One of two things is likely to happen depending on page load speed. The first is negative, where the website is poorly designed, and its pages take too much time to open. It can be regarded as slow, even if that is two or three seconds. Bear in mind modern internet users expect instant results, so when they click on any web page, they expect to see it open in the blink of an eye. If you have slow-loading website pages, the problem is that visitors will immediately click away. On one level, that is a potential customer you have lost, who likely never returns, but it gets worse. Google can identify how long web pages take to open and measure how long someone remains on a web page. Slow-loading pages and someone clicking away almost immediately are red flags to Google, and if repeated red flags occur due to slow load speeds, then the result is Google lowers that website’s ranking.
The latest trend in web design is minimalism and flat design. By “flat,” we mean plain, unadorned buttons, links, and menus. No raised edges or drop shadows, no fancy borders or glassy icons. If your forms on your site look this way, congratulations – you’re part of the latest hip design trend! But you have to be careful not to chase away customers when you simplify the visuals too much. This article at A List Apart talks about just the sort of case we’re making here. For instance, they use the example of two actions on a form, ‘submit’ and ‘cancel’, which look identical. But to someone in a hurry who doesn’t want to think too hard, making the two visually distinct by giving the default action a different color will give them that small cognitive nudge. True, you don’t want to distract the user with a bunch of noisy whistles and bells. But, as that article is pointing out, we might have swung too far the other way, until we’re taking information away from the user. We should always remember, particularly with doing business on the web, that making the process as easy and quick to navigate as possible helps increase conversions.
