The final point – make sure you use consistent fonts and graphics. Leonie Robertson from DTDigital says this should fit into your overall brand scheme, meaning your logo and colours should reflect the advertising you use offline as well.
“I would keep colours in your website consistent and limited. Get a theme happening and make use of those colours throughout. For instance if your logo is navy, use shades of blue or blues and greys together. Use colours that will compliment your brand.”
“Keep fonts consistent. While you have a limited number of web safe fonts available for use in an HTML site design, remember to use the same font throughout, if it’s Verdana, use Verdana throughout, don’t change half way through and decide you would like the rest of the site to appear in Times.”
Your website shouldn’t be a passive piece of information, these experts say. Instead, your website needs to give users some sort of action they can fulfil as soon as they visit. It could be signing up to an email address list, putting in their information or clicking on a poll.
“Have a call to action,” Taliana says. “That could be anything from an email newsletter subscription, to any sort of subscription database. You want those users to come back, or have some further contact with the site.”
“The front side of your website should be for collecting information. You should also try and collect their postcode so you can see where people are coming from.”
Robertson says your call to action should feed in to your minimalist design – your text should be bold and visible, and stand out from the background colours. Use individual graphics as well, she says, as they often attract more attention than plain text.
“The use of calls to action like buttons and product purchase messages and so on needs to fit into your design. Look at the use of bold colours, and then use buttons, messages and links to drive the user into purchasing or doing something else.”
“Make the text extremely clear because your users should know what you want to do. I have a client that designed a site with two very clear messages, and said “if you are this type of person, click here, and if you are this type of person, click over here”. It was simple and effective.”
Craig Reardon from the E-Team points out this is critically important for online retailers. He says every site selling any sort of product needs to have prompts for interaction otherwise no one will ever buy anything.
“Part of great design is putting that call to action on your website. You should be putting those at the foot of every page, such as “buy this product” or so on.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
