Web Wednesdays: Design Tips To Enhance Website Content

Interested in enhancing the visual attractiveness of your website content? Writing compelling content is a great technique to set your website apart from your competitors and to better convey the right messages to your potential customers. However, this can be ruined if your content isn’t beautifully presented and fully readable, so you must consider the visual representation of your content to ensure your message is conveyed suitably. In fact, research has revealed that given 15 minutes to read content, two-thirds would preferably read something beautifully designed than something plain.

So, for this Web Wednesdays article, we’re going to share a variety of techniques to help enhance the visual appeal of the website content. Let’s go ahead and get started.

1. Utilise White Space
2. Word Count & Image Attention
3. Well Designed Hyperlinks
4. Legible Typography

1. Utilise White Space

White “empty” space is a surprising but crucial design ingredient which can sometimes be disregarded and overlooked. White space ensures your content is clear and legible, allowing visitors to suitably concentrate on important text without creating distractions, which under other conditions would lose their interest in your content. You should incorporate white space around the text and titles to create an open and more straightforward design, which boosts user attention by 20%. However, it’s important to recognise that by employing generous amounts of white space you can unintentionally produce poor user experiences due to the appearance being too plain and uninteresting, whilst generating excessive and unnecessary scrolling throughout your website. So, by spacing elements apart to make your content more comfortable and focused to consume, you will engage better with your potential customers.

2. Word Count & Image Attention

Retaining your visitor’s attention is becoming more complex and tougher for website owners. Large content sections are often substituted by image and video alternatives which can produce more appealing experiences. Moreover, the average attention span has decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds. So does this suggest text on your website is harming your online success? Not at all, as content is a necessary element for most websites which visitors expect to see. However, it just means you need to offer a modern experience by presenting text more sparingly by exclusively only including necessary information and avoiding excessive bulky sections. On top of optimising the length of your content, by combining photos and infographics to help reinforce your content is an excellent approach to generate more visually exciting experiences and deliver your message better. In fact, it’s been found that 84% of visitors using infographics find them effective. So, by being mindful about how much text you insert and by incorporating visual imagery you will help boost the prospects of creating a successful website.

3. Well Designed Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks (generally called links) connect website visitors to internal and external data sources, such as additional web pages or images, by clicking assigned website components. They are frequently inserted into website content for a number of benefits, such as reinforcing information declared in the writing or guiding visitors to continue their journey with your website to additional pages. To improve the engagement of your content, you should clearly define and present links with typical visual indicators, such as underlining the text, applying a contrasting colour and making the text bold. This makes your links are obvious and ensures your design helps to fulfil the goal of your content. By exploiting visitor expectations and adhering to standard practices you will be able to offer a more satisfying experience.

4. Legible Typography

Advancements in technology have opened the door to varying amounts of unique experiences for visitors, so you should be conscious about how your text is presented to everyone. Suppose you’ve written a powerful and compelling content section promoting your business and inserted it onto your website. Have you reviewed the appearance of your text on different devices? This can be overlooked with content creation and can destroy the hard work of your written masterpiece. So, how do you ensure your content is readable? By applying sans-serif fonts the visual appearance of your paragraphs will improve, ensuring they are much easier to understand with the simplistic and clean characteristics of sans-serif typography. You should spend time evaluating the most common devices your potential customers use to ensure whatever device or screen size being used your text will be readable on all mobile, tablet and desktop devices. This is why investing in a mobile-friendly website is essential, as it ensures the size of your typography is perfectly suited and modified for all screen sizes. Additionally, dividing the content with bullet-points is another great technique to allow visitors to promptly consume information in short amounts of time while making your website less tiresome with bulky paragraphs.

Overall

Ultimately, it’s important to consider that it’s not just the quality of your website text which affects your visitors experience, but the appearance given to visitors to compliment the text. There are many design ingredients that you can employ to boost the overall enjoyment and success of your website content, and we hope our tips will help your business. If you have any questions feel free to let us know.