With minimal web design, the focus is to give more emphasis to the vital content of a web page. This approach removes unnecessary complexities from your design, letting the information you want to convey shine through to your customers or viewer base.
The average user spends a very small amount of time on any given web page. A common misconception of new website owners is that these users will be coming to their websites and spending time looking through all the pages and content. Unfortunately, instant gratification is becoming more and more of a requirement in our society, and more often than not these users are spending only a few seconds on a page and moving on just to get the specific information they are looking for. This is a very short time in which to grasp their attention. If that user is not able to quickly pinpoint the important elements, something that is very common on over-designed websites, they are very likely to go try somewhere else.
The more items (content, images, banners, or otherwise) a web page contains the less impact those elements are going to have to your users. The minimal design approach removes clutter from a page, which in turn can limit distractions that will divert your users away from the items you want them to see.
A big step in moving towards this minimal approach is finding the elements on your webpage that do not need to be there, rather than trying to focus on the ones that do. Making sure there is available whitespace between elements gives those important elements a chance to shine through and grab the users’ attention. Before adding that 5th picture of your storefront to your contact us page, ask yourself if it is really going to be important for the user to see that 1 picture. And then ask yourself if reducing the already existing 4 images would make you lose any value in the information that needs to be presented to your user.
Content is king with the copy of a webpage, but it is not necessary to write 1500 words for something that can just as easily be said in 150. Look through your copy and see if there’s any way you can split the content into different pages instead, or remove dialog that is being repeated throughout. Your users will thank you when they need to find out your billing address and they only have 5 minutes before they head out the door to work!
Above all else make sure whatever content you put on a webpage is of the highest quality: images, banners, copy, videos, etc. A crisp, clean, HD quality banner is going to almost always catch a user’s eye before a low quality, pixelated banner will. Copy is no exception. Misspellings, bad grammar, and run-on sentences are almost always going to divert a user’s attention away from what you want them to read in the first place.
Our designers and developers at Faster Solutions are trained to make the best of your website using these design techniques. Contact our offices today to speak with a Customer Service representative about a minimalistic design for your new website. Or if you already have a website, we would love to review it with you to see where we can reduce and/or restructure your already existing content. Remember… A little bit goes a LONG way!
