News & Insights

Are you aware that website design is driven by both search engine algorithms and functionality…?

Beyond website design and appeal, functionality ensures that users can navigate your site easily and achieve the purpose of their visit, in addition to helping your site rank higher and ensuring website traffic and sales!

1. Usable Web Design
Good web design is more than just attractive visual design. Sure, catchy visuals and colour scheme matters, but a well-thought experience is key. This will revolve around core user’s needs and wants, tendencies and limitations – as a well-designed layout and clear navigation will help the user get what he or she needs at the shortest time. In addition to distinct call-to-actions, the informational architecture of a site which is well-organised will direct users to content objectives in the shortest time, and contribute to a seamless user experience that meets expectations!

2. Sharpening UX and SEO Performance
While SEO focuses on improving your site’s search engine rankings, UX or user experience targets your site’s visitors. Together, they work hand in hand to optimise your website for both users and search engines!
In short, quality content that engages visitors (you can tell this from a low bounce rate), optimised site speed, good site navigation designed with the user in mind (think smooth navigation and consistency), site security and mobile optimisation are all important factors in the battle for search engine rankings.
Up your SEO performance by improving page load time, to avoid frustrating users with lengthy waits on your site. Avoid design touches that fulfill your own aesthetic ideal but otherwise complicate the navigation bar, so users can always find what they need easily. You could also add a button here if you feel it helps the user locate what he or she needs much more efficienty, in addition to ensuring that images are of high quality.

3. Enhancing Digital Accessibility
Ensuring that your website is accessible to all users brings many benefits, notwithstanding the likelihood of increasing your sales! In addition, being compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and following the guidelines of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) will also give your site a boost in search rankings.
All the more you should take the effort to enhance the digital accessibility of your site by being attentive to details such as your image alt text, including heading ranks in the right sequence – so readers using assistive devices such as screen readers can ‘read’ the site and its images as accurately as possible. You can use a simple crawl tool to identify alt tags to identify which ones need to be updated!

4. Text Size and Colour Contrast
Colour is another component of accessibility, and over here it means to avoid using colour as the only distinguishing factor in web design. For instance, putting hyperlinked text in a different colour without any other stylistic highlights would exclude colour-blind readers from being aware of the link. In fact, paying attention to colour contrast between background and image or web page text would probably make it easier reading for everyone else!