Web Design Packages (UK)

You may unknowingly be turning your on-line customers away as studies of website user behaviour found a low tolerance for difficult designs or slow sites… The lesson is to keep your website simple and fast to load… or your visitors will soon hit the BACK or STOP button… not want you want I’ll bet?

“Studies of user behaviour on the web found a low tolerance for difficult designs or slow websites. People don’t want to wait. And they don’t want to learn how to use your website. There’s no such thing as a user manual for a website. People want to be able to grasp the function of the site almost immediately after scanning the site for a few seconds at most.” - J. Nielson (useit.com)

No Waiting Here

People are generally time-poor and think nothing of hitting the ‘BACK or STOP’ button when a web page takes too long to load. It’s almost automatic now. How many times have you done that today??

Even with broadband (and not everyone has it remember), web page load times have become relative to the user’s previous experience. If your web page takes too long to load, your website visitor will have his/her own ‘waiting time’ threshold of just a few seconds and may well ditch your site before they even see it! If you ever bother to look at your visitor stat’s you may find that your most popular ‘entry’ page is also the most popular ‘exit’ page… you need to ask yourself why?

See your web pages as a customer doesIs the page too ‘busy’ with too many bandwidth choking images, so making it slower to load? Does the page leave the visitor wondering what action to take? Are the link texts obvious? Please don’t just use ‘click here’, it’s so lazy and uninformative. Can the user get to the menu bar without scrolling? Do the background/foreground colours contrast well?, as it needs to ‘read’ easy (check line spacing, text size and use section headings and bullet points to ease screen reading).

If your site is a fully Flash Animated one (why?) – then you’re probably asking for trouble. Flash sites are fairly poor for load-times and generally don’t navigate well if there are loads of pages. If it has automatic sound/music then that is another negative factor. Don’t force ‘on-load’ sounds … it’s annoying! Especially in an open-plan office (I know I worked in one!). Let the visitor choose sounds as on/off. And only use Flash with a useful purpose as gratuitous animation wastes time, money and costs in lost visitors… even if it does look ‘cool’

K.I.S.S. “Keep it simple, stupid!”

So don’t over complicate your web pages, keep the design simple, have only 1 or 2 main messages per page and make your website easy to navigate around. Make sure each page is within 1 or 2 clicks by using a common and well-placed menu bar… if you don’t your competitor is just a mouse-click away !!!

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