The Power of Simple & Clean Website Design
By Brad Stitgen
Is your site not performing as well as it should? Do your customers complain it’s hard to find things on your site? Do your Google Analytics stats reveal a high bounce rate for your website? If you answered yes to any of these questions your site may be in need of a simplification overhaul.
Benefits of a Simple Design
In today’s fast-paced world a great user experience is critical! The typical website visitor is looking to find information quickly and with as little effort as possible. Visitors don’t have the time, or the patients, to figure out a confusing website structure. This is especially true for the first-time or prospective customer that is not familiar with your business. Having a clear, well thought out website with simple and logical navigation is vital!
In addition to helping with the overall user experience, simple design structures have other benefits. They include:
– Better SEO: By limiting the number of topics on a specific page, SEO efforts can be more focused.
– Simple Looks Classy: Cluttered not so much. In the world of print, lots of full-color white space means increased printing costs. For this reason, we’re all used to seeing higher-end, luxury products marketed in this fashion. Fast-forward to the web — and even though there are no additional costs to being generous with the use of white-space, the generous of white space use can still impart the feeling of quality.
– Simple Sites Tend to Load Faster: With less “stuff” simple webpages tend to download more quickly. This is good for SEO as Google likes quick loading websites. Of course, if one of the few items being displayed is a large pixel heavy photo this may not be the case.
Simply Better for Mobile
As more content is viewed on mobile devices the benefit of simple website design becomes more apparent. This is due to the limited screen real estate available on such devices. The growing popularity of “responsive” websites is a reaction to this trend. Instead of simply shrinking the entire website to fit the smaller device–making the type pre-tough to read, responsive websites re-arrange the content in a manner best suited for the available screen real estate. The key point to keep in mind is that websites with a simple modular design are better suited for responsive websites.
Going past responsive design, people using mobile devices are likely to be easily distracted due to their surroundings. A simple, well-planned out webpage is much more likely to accomplish it’s intended goal. Conversely, a cluttered, busy or simply poorly thought out webpage will likely confuse or frustrate your visitor in such an environment.
The Downside of Simple
While a simple design may seem painfully obvious once completed, getting there is not always so easy. It takes research, planning, experience, testing, and more often than not… numerous revisions. In short, it takes hard work. But the results — a clean, simple, effective website that delivers results are definitely worth it!
