Fast food restaurants are uncomfortable for a reason: to encourage customer turnover. Who wants to linger when the lights are bright and the booths are hard and cold? The best websites are the opposite — the colours, type styles and fonts work together to draw potential buyers in and keep them there until they’re ready to make a purchasing decision. This article lets you in on the top sites’ simple design secrets.
If you want potential customers to linger at your website, check out your links and go deeper into your pages, make it a place they want to stay instead of driving them to your competitor with garish colours, hard-to-read fonts and flashing lights.
No one goes to the carnival to linger, relax and contemplate any big decisions. They seek tranquility and comfort. Think of a luxury hotel room: The colours evoke restfulness and calm but at the same time are muted, elegant and bold, not at all harsh or boring, irritating or dull.
Turn your website visitors into valued customers
It’s worth remembering that the older your eyes are the more difficult it is to read what’s on a monitor screen, never mind linger or reread. Video displays are proven to take longer to read than print on paper because there are so many more variables, such as a wider range of colour choices (compared to books, newspapers and magazine articles), special effects, contrast, fonts and type styles. Visitors will not think kindly of businesses or blogs that don’t take that into consideration.
Pick eye-pleasing colours for your website
How can you make your website into a luxury hotel room? You can start with good colour choices. Look at the sites of businesses that can afford to hire graphic designers. Most seem to follow the 60-30-10 rule that interior designers suggest to their clients: Pick a main colour that covers roughly 60 percent of the area, a complementary colour for 30 percent, and an accent colour for 10 percent.
If you don’t know where to start, go to the websites of major paint manufacturers where you can view their suggested colour schemes. If you cater only for a younger visitor, you have a little more freedom of colour choice. Please keep in mind that the more saturated your background colour, the more difficult it will be for you to find a font, type style and text colour.
Do your part to stamp out eye strain
If you’ve been somewhere online where you encountered small-to medium-sized light pink text on a hot pink background, did it seem to shimmer? How about bright white on blackest black, with tight text thrown in? Light text on dark backgrounds works well only if there is a minimum number of words and the text size is sufficiently large. Inverted colours in the same colour family, such as chartreuse on emerald green, pink on red or medium grey on dark grey, can be unreadable, too. Equally saturated colours such as Christmas red on Christmas green may contrast festively but they don’t contrast effectively.
Try what works
Graphic designers and others who have studied the issue of readability agree on a few key webdesign principles:
1) As a general rule, darker text on lighter backgrounds is easy on the eyes and improves readability. This is the choice of Wikipedia, Yahoo, Google, Canon and Sherwin Williams, to name only a few. Many use muted darker blues on a greyish-white background. (It’s fun to note the accent colours these sites use, also.)
2) White space is good. Not only does it look cleaner and contrast well with other colours, it separates the elements on the page and draws the eye toward links, boxes and blocks. If the entire site is coloured, the eye doesn’t know where to go first. Men, you know if you want your Jerry Garcia tie to stand out, you need to wear it on a white or palest colour shirt.
3) Not all fonts and type styles are created equal: There is widespread belief that sans serif fonts are the most readable, and there are those who maintain that serif fonts are also readable if the contrast is optimal and normal type style is used. Italics is widely regarded to be high on the unreadability scale for most fonts.
4) Bonus tip: Avoid flashing lights, spinning wheels and lots of movement. At best, these flourishes are distracting, and at worse they can be headache triggers and have been know to cause seizures. Ask any of the millions of migraine and epilepsy sufferers who spend time online.
If traffic on your website is not what you would like, design and formatting changes might be in order. For inspiration, examine your favourite websites, and ask yourself why you like being there. Or compare that luxury hotel room to an apartment with bright green or hot pink or majestic purple walls, turquoise indoor-outdoor carpeting and uncomfortable metal furniture. Where would you rather kick back, relax, and contemplate life’s mysteries?
I would love to read your thoughts and comments on this topic. Please enter them into the comments section below. Thank you very much.
Very, very helpful and well written article! I am a graphic designer and agree with what this article says. Keep the good posts coming!
Hi Rhonda,
Thank you very much for your comment and RT they are really appreciated. Often I think having a simple classic design is far more effective than a big huge flashy one. Small is the new big as they say.
Regards
Harvey