When designing your website, it can be easy to let your creative side take hold and focus on what looks great first and what works well second.
Adding loads of bells and whistles might make your website stand out, but there’s more to website design than just making a website visually appealing.
Your design can impact how people use your website and perceive your brand, so getting it right is essential.
As the saying goes, sometimes less is more; and that certainly rings true for website design.
Keep reading as I go into more detail on why a simple website design is the best option for your website.
Website clutter causes confusion
Implementing a complicated design with loads of different fonts, colours and features can make your website hard to navigate.
If people can’t navigate your website easily, they might not find important stuff like your service/product pages, contact information, or any other pages and content you want them to view.
The same goes for call-to-actions too.
If your website is cluttered with too much text, images, or vivid colour contrasts, it can distract people away from your call-to-actions, which can impact your lead and conversions!
Rather than focusing on style over substance. Focus on creating a well-functioning, intuitive website design that makes finding information quick and straightforward and doesn’t overload your website visitors.
Simple websites are easier to manage
Aside from making things easier for your users, a simple website design will make things easier for you when managing your website.
With a simple website design, you’ll be able to create new pages and tweak old content quickly and easily.
But, if your website is full of complicated CSS code or funky JavaScript animations and features, you’ll have to apply that same design to all your pages, which can be a hassle.
The more complicated code you have, the higher the risk of accidentally breaking something if you’re working on your website. (P.S. if you need help with website code audits, we recently launched Codestuff… go check it out!)
Cost is another point to think about. If you’re considering getting a new website built, remember that a more design-heavy and advanced website will take longer and cost a lot more to build.
Complicated designs can affect your SEO
Search engines love websites that are easy to understand and put user experience first.
If you’re trying to create a unique website design, you might look at tweaking core aspects of your website, like the navigation bar and page structure, to make your design stand out. But that comes with some big SEO risks.
The mistake many people make here is making their navigation bar too hard for search engines to find or their page structure too hard to understand.
If Google can’t easily crawl your site, identify pages or understand what they’re about, then some of your most important content might not get indexed or won’t rank well in search results.
It’s not all about crawlability, though; it’s about user experience too.
Having loads of images, videos, and animations on your website can drastically impact your site speed.
Also, creating a consistent experience across desktop and mobile devices will be more complicated with a more complex design.
Both site speed and mobile optimisation are key metrics that search engines use to score your website and rank your pages.
So, if your website is hard to understand or you’ve put aesthetics over functionality, it could be much harder to succeed with your SEO.
For more on how your website design can affect your SEO, check out our recent blog post covering the importance of SEO during website development!
Accessibility for visitors
To provide a great website user experience for everyone, you need to make your website accessible.
That means ensuring your design and page layouts make it easy for people, particularly those with visual impairments and other disabilities, to navigate and understand your content.
For people that are colour blind or have other visual impairments, some colour schemes or font styles can make it difficult, sometimes even impossible, to read the text on a page.
Also, if your website is full of images or video content, more so than text, it will make it difficult for users who rely on screen readers to understand the information on your pages.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t use vivid colours, or include images or video content on your website, especially when the latter two are so important.
To create an accessible, simple website design, you should ensure your colour scheme doesn’t clash with text, font styles are simple and easy to read, images have clear alt-text, videos have captions, and plenty of text on your pages for people to read.
Want to give your website design some new life?
Get in touch to find out how we can simplify your website’s design while amplifying your results!
Book a call with one of our Digital & Growth specialists, or call us on 01329 565001 or drop an email to hello@damteq.co.uk!
