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A sleek, compelling design and mouth-watering content alone cannot push your website to attain the kind of success you dream of. Rather, your site needs to be styled to attain maximum user-friendliness and functionality while being straightforward and easy to understand from the first glance.
This means you are not going to follow blindly the slogan that goes “Beauty lies in the eye of the mouse-holder.” Instead, you are going to build a professional website based on the following ground rules. Also, you can check out other reviews here later to see what makes a professional website.
1. Keep a clutter-free and straightforward homepage
Users rarely read everything they find on a site. Normally, they scan pages singling out keywords and sentences they feel are important to them. With these user habits in mind, you stand a better chance if you concentrate on appealing to emotions instead of word count.
A visitor will easily make up what’s going on a website that’s less wordy, has simple wording and requires less clicking to navigate. While some Text and Call To Action are a requirement, be sure to break these up with prominent subheadings and understandable paragraphs.
But most importantly, add your company logo and a large image that communicates your point.
2. Add Readable Web Content
“Readability” in this case refers to the measure of how easy it is for visitors to spot words, phrases, and sentences. A site with high readability attracts users to efficiently scan it and absorb the info in the text without much ado.
Here are tips for achieving website readability:
- Check on Contrast: be sure to have sufficient contrast between the background and text so that the text is visible.
- Check font: Use Sans Serif instead of Serif fonts. These are the best fonts for web texts. They are less fancy and curvy, unlike the serifs.
- Visible font size: Use fonts that are visible depending on the interface you expect visitors to view your site. Don’t go for tiny fonts, if anything, medium or large fonts are better than small fonts as no one will complain of visible text.
3. Make an easy-to-navigate Website
Website navigation should be made as trouble-free as possible. You don’t want to have users hunting or wandering your site to get whatever info they want.
Here’s how to improve the navigation experience for your visitors:
- Add your business logo to your homepage: this will tell your visitors who you are at first glance.
- Carefully plan your menu: Place it in the top section of your site –preferably in the header and have the sections structured based on their order of importance.
- Make vertical navigation easier: for long-scrolling sites, try to add an anchor menu that allows viewers to “back to top” or “jump to”
- Add an informative footer: because this is the last thing a visitor sees on your homepage, be sure to provide all key links there. Also add terms of use, FAQs, contact info, etc.
Lastly, you don’t want to be online and not mobile friendly in an era that depends largely on smartphones. Pay attention to your mobile site practices to ensure your visitor enjoys on their smartphone the same excellent browsing they experience on their PC.