The tools for building and maintaining websites today are easier to learn and use than ever before. Platforms like Squarespace have made what used to require professional teams buildable by newcomers, but this accessibility can also be a double-edged sword. The ability to create a website without an in-depth understanding of user experience can lead to the creation of inefficient pages that don’t fully leverage a business’ potential.
More specifically, it’s the step of customizing a website to your customers and their access devices that can require additional attention. Exploring a few common mistakes and positive examples here, we’ll explain how these challenges can manifest, and how you can address them to better appeal to your customer base.
Understand Your Audience
The perfect website for a car parts distributor will be different from a perfect design for a hospitality or leisure service, and this is true for every business in every industry. In an age where it’s so easy to create websites from templates, it can be easy to choose which looks the most visually exciting and go with that option, but this approach causes problems. The target audience for each will tend to have vastly different wants and needs, and understanding this needs to be the cornerstone of your design process.
Consider an online casino website as an example, such as this service that helps users play baccarat with crypto. As part of a greater iGaming business, this page offers a wide range of options including classic baccarat, live versions, and newer versions of the game such as Speed Baccarat and Baccarat Pro. This is while the baccarat page still links to a range of other games, while still clearly displaying special features like deposit bonuses and free spins.
The players who visit this baccarat page can be crypto newcomers, or they could be veterans. They might play on mobile, or they could prefer baccarat on desktop systems. The audience for online games like baccarat is extremely broad, which means the website needs to ensure it’s both appealing and perfectly navigable to all ends of the user experience and access device spectrum. This is why the baccarat page scales so well between different devices, and it’s why the games are similarly flexible with screen sizes and the level of help support available when users engage.
Balancing Flow and Show
A website needs to be about more than just offering a service, it should also drive users to want to explore more, to drive further traffic and sales. This can be a challenge, in finding the right balancing point between delivering what you already feature, and offering what customers might later want or need.
If your service leans too much into just plain functionality, then it’s less likely to stick in users’ minds and drive further sales. If it advertises its extra features too heavily, users will find it frustrating. The best websites need to keep their advertising subtle, while also relating additional goods and services as closely to what a user might need as possible.
To return to the car parts distributor example, consider if a customer comes to look for replacement parts for a wheel. On the selection page, you want to help them find what they want as easily as possible while adding targeted advertising for other related parts that they might also need. Advertise the same size bolts and caps the wheels need on the same page, for example, and you can afford to be a little more direct with additional offers. Trying to offer headlights while customers are seeking wheel repairs, on the other hand, is much less appropriate, and won’t be as well-received.
Remember Consistent Design Across Platforms
The final major area where us new web designers make mistakes is in varying content and design too much across different platforms. It’s true that you’ll need to ensure your service is flexible enough to scale to different sizes of screens like those of smartphones, tablets, and desktops, but there’s a limit here.
Sometimes it can be necessary to change the layouts of pages significantly to fit mobile screens, like changing sidebars to dropdown boxes so they don’t obscure views while browsing. This can confuse users, however, if they’re unused to one form of access. To avoid this issue, you need to include some elements that remain consistent across all different platforms. This can be a background that draws the eye across key elements, such as the general color scheme and logo placement, or it can be the section links placement even if the text for these sections turns into symbols on smaller screens. Customer understanding starts unconsciously, and you need to aid this process.
Few websites start with the full potential leveraged. Almost all will require experimentation, and this is an ongoing process that can take years to become comfortable with. Don’t feel bad if you don’t get everything right at first, as every little mistake presents an opportunity to learn. As long as you’re diligent, you’ll go a long way and eventually find the perfect individualized design for your business.
