When it comes to Seattle area web design, usability plays a huge role in how your website converts visitors into paying customers. Simply having a website with high rankings isn’t enough. You can get tons of traffic from the search engines with a well-optimized website, but if it isn’t designed with usability in mind, all of those visitors just may hit the back button.

This post offers five of the most important tips for usable web design in Seattle.

Know Your Audience

Whom are you targeting? Mothers of preschoolers? Attorneys or other professionals? Other businesses? Retirees? Your website design must appeal to your target audience in design, usability, and content. If it doesn’t appeal to your audience, it won’t speak to them on the level needed to build trust and convert visitors into buyers.

Communicate Quickly

Most visitors will make a judgment about your website within five seconds of arriving. If you don’t communicate your message quickly and catch the attention of visitors immediately, you risk them leaving your website. The faster, better, and easier you make communicating with visitors, the more likely you are to capture their attention and keep them on your website longer.

Design Beautiful but Useful Pages

An important metric that SEOs, as well as the latest Google algorithm, are following is “Bounce Rate”. Bounce rate measures whether users open you page and stick around, or if they see nothing of use on your site and bounce quickly somewhere else. Great design is the Internet Velcro that keeps bounce rates low.

Great design is important, but avoid feature overload. Things like auto-play music may irritate users and cost you customers.

Simple Is Best

While you want to get your message to visitors quickly, it’s also important that you keep your web design Seattle simple. Fonts that are difficult to read, large blocks of text, busy graphics, cluttered web pages, and poor navigation can cost you sales. Make sure your website is easy to read, and include plenty of blank space so visitors can find what they need immediately.

Avoiding the irritating features we discussed before doesn’t mean avoiding features. Photos and images that illustrate your brand and the page content are very good to see on a web page. So are fast loading videos and even mp3’s. Just ensure that the Auto-play is disabled so that the whole office-space doesn’t have to listen to your user’s selection.

Keep Pages Consistent

Part of creating an easy to navigate website involves keeping all of the pages consistent. Keep the layout, fonts, artwork, and other aspects consistent from page to page. A consistent website puts forth a more professional appearance, and keeps visitors from thinking they clicked through to a different website when clicking on your navigation links.

Remember that your website is the heart of your business’s Web-presence. You want your primary brand image to be attractive and consistent; treat your website the same way.

You can increase your chances of creating a winning website with these web design tips.

Need help creating or redesigning a website or blog for your business? Contact Seattle SEO Consultant today for a Free 30 Minute Website Design Consultation. We can create an affordable website or blog that helps you achieve your business goals.