Nowadays, having a website isn’t enough, especially when you are running an online business. Your website needs to have elements to keep your audience engaged and informed at the same time. According to a recent study, design elements present on a website always create an impactful first impression in the minds of the visitors.
Any visitor would need only 0.05 seconds to form an opinion about any website. That is why having an attractive and user-friendly web design in Toronto is extremely important for websites, especially those selling businesses online.
In this article, you will learn how you can blend both functionality and creativity in web design.
Tips to Blend Creativity and Functionality in Web Design
Here are some of the best tips that will help you blend functionality and creativity into your webpage to keep your visitors engaged and convert them into customers, as given below:
Define the Purpose of Your Website and the Target Audience:
Before you start designing your website, you should have a clear idea of what you want to earn and what kind of audience you want to target. What is the main goal and message of your website? Who are your target audience, and what are their requirements? How can you measure your website’s success? When you get the answers to these questions, you will be able to define the audience of the website and the purpose of your website. It will act as a guide for your priorities and decisions you make with regard to design.
However, you also need to be flexible throughout the web development process. It will help you ensure that you are on track to deliver the project without compromising usefulness and usability.
Follow the Principles of Web Design:
If you want your website to be user-friendly and functional, you need to follow some basic web design principles. These include layout consistency, colour scheme, navigation and font. Apart from all these elements, you need to avoid any kind of clutter and elements that can be unnecessary.
You should also ensure responsiveness to adapt to various screen sizes and accessibility to all types of users, no matter what their preferences, abilities, and disabilities are.
To achieve this, you should use proper contrast, font size, captions, alt text, and keyboard navigation. It will help you make the website inclusive and compliant with modern web standards.
Interact and Produce Content in an Interactive Manner:
It is important to incorporate web design principles to maintain functionality. However, you can be creative with the interaction and your content, which will make your website stand out and connect with your users to keep them engaged. Storytelling methods like transitions, animations, or parallax effects can help you create a captivating journey or narrative.
In addition to that, you can also utilize interactive elements, such as polls, quizzes, games, or chatbots that will invite visitors to participate. This will compel them to explore your website more.
Furthermore, you can also use multimedia formats like podcasts, videos, portfolios, and infographics, which will help you showcase your creativity and skills.
However, you need to be careful while giving priority to form over function. There are many users who dislike so-called features like scroll hijacking. In this way, you need to always make sure that the net value of interacting with the website is positive and doesn’t reflect any unnecessary features when you want your website to serve its defined purpose.
Ultimately, it is simplicity that impresses the users the most. They will definitely stay away from websites that are all show and no go.
Test Your Website and Optimize Accordingly:
The most important thing to keep your website engaging and creative is testing and optimization. It helps you ensure it works well and meets the goals you have defined. For instance, usability testing involves asking real users to use your website for any task or purpose and noticing their behaviour, satisfaction and feedback.
This will help you recognize and fix any issues regarding usability that can potentially hamper the performance of the website and the user experience.
Additionally, you can also utilize analytics tools to monitor and analyze how visitors can engage with your website, offering insights into the website’s reach, impact and effectiveness.
Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you point out specific issues and identify the devices and environment of your users, along with the content that is most and least successful.
You should also check and remove content that is outdated as it may end up doing more harm than good. You can even use Google Page Speed insights that will test your responsive designs and give you a detailed insight into how your website may perform on mobile and desktop. This will allow you to shape up your website and blend in creativity and functionality with due effect.
Why Is It Important to Have a Balanced Web Design?
Having a web design that balances both creativity and functionality effectively is the biggest priority for many websites. At the same time, your website should also be user-friendly and optimized to perform well with the users.
However, having a website that is visually pleasant is not enough. The technology that acts as the backbone of the design also equally important. Having a visually pleasing and advanced website can improve the user experience and help your brand establish identity and credibility.
According to a study by Adobe, 38% of users will stop interacting with websites if the content present in it is found to be unattractive. Another study by Google shows that 53% users abandon pages that can take more than 3 seconds to load.
Conclusion
Websites are the backbone for many businesses selling products and services online. They need to be attractive yet functional enough to ensure the users have a better experience and face no issues while exploring the sites.
The above mentioned tips not only help you ensure a balance between the creativity and functionality, but also help you improve the entire user experience without any compromise.
