It’s amazing how just by tweaking position, prominence and even colours you can achieve amazing results with your website. There are so many differing opinions when it comes to what works and what doesn’t work online.
Our top 6 tips to optimise your website:
TIP #1: BIG Buttons to optimise your website
The larger the element is, the more important it is. Decide how vital certain site actions are, and size your call to action buttons accordingly
TIP #2: Image Captions
Often overlooked, image captions are a great place to add a bit more style to your website or to give some unique insight into the subject of the image.
TIP #3: Breadcrumbs
For websites that have a lot of pages, breadcrumbs can enhance your website visitors experience and reduce the number of actions a website visitor needs to take in order to get to a higher level page.
TIP #4: Prominent Search Box
Website visitors will use the search box to find specific content they are looking for, if a websites content is not properly organised an efficient search engine is not only helpful but crucial.
TIP #5: Read more and Continue Reading links
Every website has its own way of inviting readers to click on an article link, but including Read More and Continue Reading links allows designers to give the website visitors a snippet of the article whilst also being able to compress content so that it appears above the fold.
Tip#6: A website that encourages readers to scroll
Whilst it’s important to prioritise your content above the supposed fold so it’s the first thing visitors to your site are presented with. It’s a reality that often there is content and other important links below the fold too, so how do you get this content noticed too? One great way of ensuring users scroll below the fold is teasing out the content with an overlapping image.
This example from simple.com shows this technique applied to their live website, using a full screen image that you naturally scroll to see who else is on the page aside from the image.
Hopefully these tips will conjure inspiration for your current or future website project and serve as a reminder not to ignore these important design elements when you are ready to optimise your website.