How to Ensure Your Website is UX Ready! Web Design

1. Every web designer in The Woodlands knows that a good user experience is the key to a satisfied user base. Still, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the website design can be tweaked at a later date to accommodate this, this is not being proactive enough during the development phase. The following few tips will make you see that good web design doesn’t need to put a huge strain on your resources. By taking a couple of basic principles into account, a lot of it can be fixed while you are still in the brainstorming phase of your website design. So, here is why accessibility should be at the forefront of every great website design and what you can do to achieve it. 1. Keep the colors simple: Shapes and colors play an enormous role in how a user might view your website. Utilizing simple colors in your web design doesn’t always indicate low budget to your visitors, some high-end brands use simple colors in their ecommerce stores to connote luxury. If you don’t know where to begin, there are certain tools like the Chrome plug-in Spectrum that will help you pick the right color combination with ease. 2. Verifications and checks: When using the website to make payments or input potentially sensitive data, it’s easy to enter panic mode, thinking you’ve made a mistake somewhere along the way. When you’ve come to the end of the questionnaire, only to find out there is no way to go back and make edits to the data you’ve submitted, anxiety ensues. A seasoned web designer knows the value of giving users the option to double-check if everything went right. Even if there is no option to re-do your choices, you should at least have an overview of what you’re sending over. To truly go the extra mile in web design, you can also incorporate some form of double-verification by sending an SMS confirmation to the recipient’s phone. That way, nothing will slip through the cracks undetected. 3. Too many prompts are distracting: Speaking on the subject of anxiety, have you ever encountered one of these websites that just shower you with an endless array of prompts and tries to instill a sense of urgency with these so-called ‘limited’ offers and countdowns? Well, the marketers know these convert fairly well, hence finding new ways to implement them at every opportunity that presents itself. Though, if you know such website designs can truly trigger an anxiety attack in your users, are the extra conversions truly worth the sacrifice? Instead of contributing to the problem, be a part of the solution. Even when a countdown timer simply cannot be avoided, cater to the needs of the anxious by gently reminding them an offer is set to expire and give them the option to extend the timer if need be. 4. Acknowledge the fact that some visitors to your website are robotic: While true that a web designer should prioritize the visitors of flesh and bone, you do have to keep in mind that search engine crawlers need to have an easy time doing their job as well. After all, it’s in your interest not to make their crawling any harder than it needs to be as you will be rewarded with better search engine rankings which means more traffic. Even to this very day, Google’s crawlers may have a hard time processing certain things such as animations and JavaScript. While completely removing these from your website may be a bit extreme,

2. you do need to make sure to make it more readable for them. For example, introducing an alternative element that appears if the main one can’t load or be read properly is a good way to start. 5. Keep your message straightforward: While playing around with words every so often could serve as a way to break up the monotony and make your brand fun, it’s important to cater to a wide range of people by having your web page design and the content it features incorporate as many plain English words as possible. Not all of your visitors are equally as gifted, so it’s important not to leave anyone out and focus on a site design that is accessible to as wide of an audience as possible. 6. Alt-text is not just for web crawlers: We live in a world where multimedia is the norm. Though, with so many pictures we upload, properly marking them with relevant alt tags can quickly fly right over our heads. Did you know that as much as 29% of your user base is likely using a screen reader to consume the content you’ve prepared for them? Alt-text is a way to put things into perspective and give them context. In other words, you’ll be covering the users who use a screen reader, plus the cases where the web page has failed to load properly for whatever reason. 7. Think about how long the content is that you’re presenting: You’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king”. Though, apart from hiring quality writers who are knowledgeable about the topic, what else can you do to ensure that your web page design measures up? Getting someone to read your website is good, but that alone won’t get the job done. You need to come up with ways to keep your user base engaged. Large areas of text may be informative, but they do a poor job at keeping your users engaged. The best web designers know that slapping a piece of text on the website and calling it a day isn’t enough. Instead, you should be walking a fine line between keeping your content informative and to the point. There is nothing more bothersome than the dreaded wall of text. So, if you simply cannot be the judge of what portion of your content should be discarded to make way for a better piece, at least make sure to cut it into multiple segments. That being said, it’s even better if you can think about this during the web design phase of your website. That way, you can also make sure that the sentences you write don’t end up being too long. Whenever in doubt, keeping it short, simple, and to the point is the way to go. 8. Multiple ways of communication: This is especially important if you’re working with your web designer to create an interactive website. Getting in touch through live chat, telephone, or email- offers plenty of opportunities for users to share their thoughts, no matter how busy their schedule may be or how they prefer to interact in general. Is your web site design accessible to all of your customer base? Schedule a call with our team of professional website designers in The Woodlands to ensure you are building a website that will convert! Source: https://www.wsixmedia.com/blog/how-to-ensure-your-website-is-ux-ready