If you are building a website keep in mind that the website appearance is critically important to retain visitors and keep bounce rates low. According to usability experts, majority of people will be closing the page right away if they don’t like its appearance. In such a situation, you must remember that it is very important to identify your site’s target audience with regard to age group, gender, education level, etc.
The color theme, layout style, and sounds used in design of your site should be optimized to match the tastes of your target audience. Age-Gender combination is one of the main influencers here. Unfortunately, many website and game designers don’t pay attention to this and cater to their own tastes.
Certain aspects like the colour combinations used on your website should reflect your target audience preferred tastes rather than your own. In case you are not aware, color psychology is an important factor and researchers claim that it is based on some primary psychological aspects of the human brain. People are more likely to notice disturbing colour patterns than any other visible problems on the website.
As an example of missed opportunities you can consider psychological game-based software for brain training called Cogmed. The program was developed by world top neuropsychologists, but the interface was designed by mediocre programmers. Cogmed has different modules designed for different age groups, yet they all have the same appearance in terms of colour and styles. Cogmed program is considered to be the most effective tool to mitigate memory and attention problems of ADHD children, yet many children don’t like to use it because… the interface is too boring! What a waste! We are not talking about some website here; this is a multi-million dollar product that is used by thousands of psychologists all over the world.
Using the best methods for better website appearance
Keeping in mind, the target audience of the site, you should build a website that fulfills the need of the customer. Building ecommerce based website is similar to that. Here are some of the tips to making your website more effective and looking better.
Colour psychology
Colours represent various moods of different people. A designer should use those colors in such a way that attracts new visitors as well as repeat visitors on the website. It’s all about reading the psychology and making it worth the visit. Using a color scheme, they will react to various elements that combine the website.
Font Styles and Sizes
First impressions are most important. You should know your target market and what users want from your website. Font style and sizes matter a lot as they are the pillars of success to building a website. Some of the common fonts used in the website include Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and web dings. People are used to these fonts, so if you are going to use any other fonts on the website, people might not like them and get negative feeling when browsing your pages. Additionally, some non-common fonts may not even be installed on your visitors’ computers.
Product images
Using of high quality images makes your website look appealing and fresh. It is important that you should optimize your website for humans and not just for search engines ranking for Google images.
Website navigation and usability
Page navigation is one of the most critical aspects when building a website, especially ecommerce site. Web designers face a huge task while you create your ecommerce website navigation. Before you launch your website, it is important that you think through how to organize your pages and think of cross navigation from the homepage and go further into other pages in your website. You should always aim for minimum number of clicks possible. The navigation should be simple and intuitive, and you should always test it with friends, relatives, or independent testers (if you have budget) to get feedback on style and navigation.
If you want to build a website, focusing on customer psychology is important and can be a main factor for website’s success or failure. It is as critical as content of your site or blog. Profile and research your potent customer, read his mind, and do what the customer want to see.
