When you work with a Charleston web design expert to build a website for your company, there are a lot of details that your designer will think through from the time you first meet and the time your new website hits the Internet. With some of those details, it’s easy to see why they are important—of course the text on your home page, for example, needs to clearly set forth what your company does and why you do it best. But there are a lot of small details that the average visitor to a website doesn’t consciously notice, but have an actual impact on that same visitor’s overall impression of the website. Those small details have the ability to make your website effective or ineffective, and your Charleston web design provider needs to have a firm grasp on them. Otherwise, your website won’t convert visitors and no one will be able to figure out why. Here are four web design details that really do matter.
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Color Scheme
Just ask an interior designer if you are skeptical about how colors and the relationships between them affect the emotions and thoughts of the observer. Everyone has their favorite color, of course, but your website doesn’t need to cater to that. What it does need to do is use color variants and combinations that complement one another rather than clashing. The perfect balance between what’s familiar and what’s unexpected will make your website pop out and grab the attention of the visitor. Bad color combinations, on the other hand, will annoy the visitor the longer they stay on your site…which probably won’t be that long anyway.
Simple Navigation
It’s easy for a beginning Charleston web design student to theorize that the best type of navigation structure presents the website’s entire sitemap to the visitor up front. You’ve probably visited websites like that, with ten or twelve items on a navigation bar, each of those items leading to a drop-down menu with ten more items. Some of those menu items may even have drop-down menus of their own, meaning that you could be asked to look at 50 or 60 individual menu items before you find the one that perfectly describes what you’re looking for.
This type of navigation is a disaster, especially on mobile devices with small screens. You want your website to be as simple as possible, even if that means you don’t have a separate page filled with information about every one of your products or services. Think of your website as an introduction to your company rather than an exhaustive inventory of everything you can do. If a visitor to your site is impressed, they’ll get in touch with you directly to inquire about their specific needs.
Contact Options
Speaking of getting in touch with you directly…your website should be strategically built in such a way that the visitor can always find a quick, easy way to talk to you directly. From the Charleston web design professional’s perspective, it’s all too easy to build a “contact us” page and assume that visitors will find it on their own. From the visitor’s perspective, however, it’s much more convenient if you place a clearly marked “Get in Touch” or “Contact Us” button on each page of the site where a visitor might think “That’s interesting, I’d like to talk to someone about this.” That button may just lead to your contact page, but you’ve saved your visitor the trouble of going back up to the navigation bar and looking for the contact page himself.
Social Media Links
For whatever reason, it’s popular for some Charleston web design folks to consign icon links to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other social media pages to the footer of the website. That means that a visitor to your site will only discover those links if he scrolls to the end of the page, and that only describes a small percentage of your website’s visitors. It’s a much better strategy to place those icons in the header of your site, above the navigation bar. That way they’ll be one of the first things your visitor notices, giving you a much better chance of engaging with them socially and extending your relationship with them beyond their visit to your website.
Give us a call to talk about more great Charleston web design ideas, and to start building your new website!
