How can I make it pretty AND user friendly?

5 TIPS FOR CREATING A USER FRIENDLY WEBSITE

So you have a website started but your wondering how to make it more user friendly? User experience (UX) for a website is the overall journey and interaction a visitor has while navigating through a site. It starts with a user’s initial arrival and continues through their entire experience clicking through the site. A good user experience focuses on how seamless, intuitive, and satisfying a user’s experience is.

HIERARCHY

Visual hierarchy is crucial in website design as it guides users through content, emphasizing what's important and directing their attention effectively. Use a combination of scale, color, alignment, repetition, proximity, and white space to show visual hierarchy. For example, larger elements tend to draw more attention. Use varying sizes to differentiate between headers, subheaders, and body text.

BE CONSISTENT:

Consistency improves user experience by creating predictability. When users navigate your site and find similar styles, layouts, and navigation patterns across pages, they can easily understand how to interact with the site, reducing confusion and frustration.

RESPONSIVE DESIGN:

Responsive design ensures that your website looks and functions well across all screen sizes and devices including phones, laptops, ipads, desktops and more. This functionality is crucial in providing a good user experience and preventing someone from leaving your website due to frustration with pinch-zooming or difficulty navigating.

Graphic showing a phone to a ipad to a computer screen

ACCESSIBILITY:

Ensure your website is accessible to everyone, including people who use screen readers. Some easy ways to make sure your website is accessible is to not use an image for text, add alt text to your images, and captions to videos.

NAVIGATION:

A well-structured navigation system makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently. Clear and intuitive navigation encourages users to explore your website further, increasing engagement and potentially reducing bounce rates. For example, call to action buttons are typically in the header of the website so they are quickly seen by a user and they know where to click next. This ensures ease of use and encourages more people to move to the next step.

Ultimately, a great user experience will make or break the success of your site, we hope these 5 tips get you on the right track to making your website not only aesthetically pleasing but also an enjoyable experience for your users.