Summary: Designing a landing page for a website involves several strategic decisions. One needs to design a page in such a way that more and more visitors are attracted to the site.
Ensuring client satisfaction through effective website design is just the first step. But once it is made public, the website design needs to attract the attention of millions. One should find ways to encourage the visitors to visit more often, and even contribute to sales.
Customer engagement is extremely complex and an integral part of user experience. Here are some clever design tips to attract visitors to your website. Breathe new energy into the site to win back visitors!
1. Parallax: Turning Scrolling into Engagement
One can boost 70% more engagement to your site with just a single change. Parallax scrolling is one of the major things affecting the design industry since it delivers a unique and eye-catching way to deliver the company message.
Parallax involves the use of several elements that move as one scroll down the page, creating a dynamic experience encouraging the user to scroll further.
Advanced code-free website design platforms help in developing parallax websites with pixel perfect accuracy. Some sites facilitate the production of such parallax websites with ease.
2. Symbols and Iconography: Visual Impact
On information-rich sites, writers tend to use text to describe things. But with the trend in current times, it is important to have designers devise ways to present text with visual impact.
Use of icons can help visitors to search and find information quickly. The tiny visuals illustrate the concepts and the distinctive look helps visitors to navigate from place to place.
Icons were previously implemented as bitmap graphics, but in recent times, designers can make use of icon fonts which behave like text, are vector-based and infinitely scalable. These icons can be customized via CSS too. Glyphter allows the user to draw from diverse open-source icon sets or even upload your own glyphs to make icons for use on your next site.
Icons now support text content, and interface elements and make the entire content dynamic and easy to read.
3. Flexible Typography: Responsive Design for Content
Responsive design does not just hint at layout – but works on content too. A layout needs to adapt to screen sizes, but the content needs to be adaptable too.
Mobile users will find it cumbersome to read long paragraphs, so the mobile version should be concise and precise with regards to call to action. Dynamic type techniques should be used to render text at a comfortable size.
Having content that responds immediately to the visitor’s reading situation makes site navigation more fluid, and more engaging.
4. Vector Images for Responsive Visuals
Text is part of web design while the imagery is sometimes the most important of them too. Imagery is crucial in building the identity of the company and even in building brands.
Use of vector graphics is nowadays extensive since bitmap images used to load slowly. Vector images are mathematical instructions for rendering visuals that can be scaled to an unlimited size without any degradation whatsoever.
Use of SVG is preferred by web designers because it can be actively manipulated like any other markup, thus resulting in interactive implementations. These elements are lightweight too and rendered directly through the browser, without any extraneous loading of useless and heavy assets!
5. Gamification
Gamification is highly tricky wherein introduction of game-like elements on the site gives visitors a sense of interaction and makes it enjoyable to navigate.
Gamification involves badges to unlock for completing tasks. One can view sites like Treehouse that involves the visitor with such elements and keeps retaining the interest. Gamification in blogs or PR sites takes the form of discount coupons that are offered to visitors for piquing their interest.
Some sites offer free ebook downloads for tweeting a link while coupons are offered to visitors when they have placed orders or explored a full catalog.
Personalize a visitor’s experience with gamification helps in a big way and encourages users to come back to the site.
6. Image Compression: Speed Loading
Slow load times affect website engagement severely. People have short attention spans and hence invariably leave when the site does not load. With websites becoming complex and visually appealing, load issues crop up again and again.
It is important to optimize images for the web and minify content while making the site dynamic through a content delivery network. Minimization strips the content pages of all whitespace, comments, and redundancy that help load pages slightly faster.
Your site’s image assets can be minimized too without compromising their visual quality. Additionally, websites can utilize Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to distribute files far and wide to different servers around the world, thus loading the pages based on the server closes to the visitor.