Maintaining an existing site is as complicated as starting a new one. There are thousands of new companies being established every day, making staying ahead of the game and retaining visitors more difficult to do. In today’s internet landscape, user experience is just as important as having quality content and a visually appealing website.
We here at 3 Prime love tinkering with different parts of a website to enhance user experience. In this article, we’re going to share some of the best tips you can implement right away in order to improve your site’s user experience.
Differentiate Hyperlinks and Bullets
Not all visitors have the time to read through your content. Some of them – including you and I, when we’re browsing through other websites – simply scan through a page to find the information we are looking for. This is where bullets come in handy.
You can add a summary of the article at the beginning or at the end of the page. Simply display the summary as a list of bullet points and you can help users who scan the page to understand what the content is all about. Differentiate the bullets you add to the article to grab attention.
The same differentiation can be applied to hyperlinks. You can change the background to allow users to spot hyperlinks immediately. You can also change the colour and weight of URLs to separate them from the rest of the paragraph. These hyperlinks will function as stoppers, elements that will stop and direct users’ attention to key phrases in the article.
Be Mindful with Images and Visual Elements
Visual elements are great for making a website more appealing, but they don’t always play well when it comes to delivering a good user experience. Large images, animations and videos can slow a page down considerably.
There are two ways you can get around this. First, you can switch to a more capable hosting service in order to deliver visual elements without sacrificing page speed. Companies like certahosting.co.uk optimize their servers for better, faster content delivery; you can gain so much from these services.
The second approach is to limit the use of images and visual elements. In the old days, we used blank PNG files to add spaces or colours to a page. Today, HTML5 and CSS3 are more than capable of creating these elements – and even animating different parts of the site – for a better user experience.
Use Whitespace to Your Advantage
Add too many elements and your page will start to look crowded and cluttered. While a full layout may work for certain types of websites, such as news portals, it is often frustrating for users. There is something about a page full of text, squares, images and other elements that make browsing through the site a little bit less enjoyable.
Whitespace is your friend. Simply increasing the amount of space between lines of text can make the entire content more readable. The same approach can be applied to other parts of the site too. By utilizing whitespace wisely – and applying the previous tips we covered in this article – you can boost your site’s user experience level.