A business website aims to attract and interest visitors, and arouse interest in the product or service that it sells.
A good design greatly enhances the appeal of a website, but the ultimate aim of any business website is to sell.
New-age businesses like Fitbit, Dropbox and Airbnb have exceptionally beautiful and well-designed websites. With the new companies setting the bar high, other companies are also compelled to up their ante.
Human beings love things of beauty and we generally would like to buy things that are aesthetically pleasing. The sense of satisfaction that comes from buying a beautifully designed product is something that we all relish. An iPhone is a phone with some good features, but it is the mind-blowing design that allowed it to walk away with billions of dollars in sales.
If you are designing your business website ensure you wow your first-time visitor with beauty. You can be sure you have slammed a home run with the first impression you have managed to create.
And how exactly you can do that?
Have a Fast Loading Site
One of the biggest factors hampering the aesthetics of a website is the time it takes to load. If your site takes longer than 10 seconds to load, you can be sure that 50% of your prospective visitors will run out of patience.
The perceived load time can be very different from the actual one. Test out the site on connections with different speeds. Many people have internet connections that are 36.6 kbps or 28.8 kbps, so it is important you check loading time on all connections.
Scrutinize each page and see to it that they do not have traffic-killing graphics and animations. Yes, they do serve to drive home your message powerfully, but increased loading time will not give you the results you desire.
You should decrease the file size of graphics, delete plugins you don’t require, enable browser caching, optimize images and use onsite text links to promote products and services.
And of course, the clincher-Google takes into account page speed when ranking your website.
Color Scheme Matters a Lot
The color scheme you choose for your website needs to relate to and agree with the nature of your business, and the type of services or products you sell.
If you sell personal hygiene products a warm color scheme laying an emphasis on red and maroon might not work, unless you are a youthful and irreverent company known for creating its own set of rules.
Johnson & Johnson website has a lot of whitespace, and uses light blue font color. The banner is in red which emphasizes the role J&J plays in the field of healthcare as well. The website clearly conveys the nature of business the conglomerate is engaged in.
Environment-focused companies like Seventh Generation, which sells eco-friendly cleaning products, lean towards colors like green and blue in their website. The safety, purity and sustainable nature of their products ooze into the color scheme as well.
Be Innovative
Aesthetics should not limit itself to beauty alone. Your website reflects your company, your mission, values and the promise you make to your customers.
A fabulous design alone will not give you the results you are looking for. The Web and what people get to see there is changing and transforming virtually every second.
If you really want to create a lasting impression on your visitor you need to be innovative. New things said in a nice way or old things said in a totally new way have the potential to arrest your visitor/prospective customer’s attention.
Don’t Lose Sight of Your Customer’s Needs
As you strive to create the most aesthetic website for your business, it is highly possible that you will forget about the core needs of the person visiting your website.
Know the doubts and questions that your visitor may have on his or her mind. Ensure that all your web pages are at the maximum only at a distance of 5 clicks from the home page.
Do not confuse him and make him scroll down, read through, go back and click again to find out what he is looking for. A highly responsive and customer-oriented website will have a high rate of visitor retention and eventually, sales.
If you can prevent the visitor from thinking about the clicks then too your bounce rate will come down considerably. Interesting, informative and innovative website content will definitely make the stay and clicks more satisfying for your visitor.
Conclusion
It is not very difficult to make an attractive website. Ensure it also helps you achieve your business goals, and it will be a win-win situation for both you as well as your online visitor.
January 27, 2015
