When creating websites, many designers completely forget to ask themselves some of the most important questions:

• What is this website here to do?
• Why does this page exist?
• What, specifically, do we want the user to do here? 

By reminding yourself of your objectives throughout the design process, you can avoid adding useless noise and clutter, and instead focus on increasing leads and conversions.

It’s Easy to Forget

Some websites tend to exist without a real purpose and perform poorly. This doesn’t happen by design, it happens because people lose sight of what’s important. They forget their objectives. For example:

• Designers are told to design, 
• Developers are told to develop, 
• Bloggers are told to blog, 
• The SEO team are told to do SEO

Site or page objectives should be at the heart of a site’s design. But, with staff focusing on their day job, sometimes the over-arching goal can become buried underneath the virtual pile of work on a designer’s desk. Or sometimes, the quest for aesthetics and the practicalities of functionality can cloud an objective and force it to take a back seat.

Where’s Your Banana?

In his book The Big Red Fez, Seth Godin mentions that internet users are like monkeys (but, sometimes, not quite as cute). Your call to action (CTA), or your objective, is the banana. All the monkey is interested in is the banana. So, if you hide the banana at the foot of the page, make it small and blue, what chance does the monkey have of finding it? 

But, if you make the banana BIG, clear and obvious, you stand a much better chance.

How to Meet Objectives Consistently

Whatever your single, specific objective is for each page, this is where your design efforts should start and end. Take whatever it is that you want the user to do, your objective, and make it stupidly simple accomplish. 

Here’s some ideas on how you might do that:

• Want users to sign up to email notifications? Put it front and center.
• Want your blog post to be shared? Put the important stuff in the first paragraph.
• Want to increase sales? Stick your most popular product on your Home page. 
• Want your ‘Enquiries’ menu option clicked more? Put it top of the list.
   

How to Fix Objective Oversights

Remind yourself of your objective constantly when making design decisions. One of the ways to do this is to use a little mind trick in order to get your objectives buried in your brain. Create a trigger that reminds you to check whether your design meets your objectives.

Remember our monkey and its banana? Good. Now, close your eyes (after you’ve read this sentence) and just imagine that banana sitting right next to the Save button in your software. (And open.) Now, every time you reach for the Save button, imagine that banana.

Let it remind you to put the banana front and center. Let it urge you to make your objective obvious to the user and easy to accomplish. Then, take a quick glance at your work and ask yourself whether everything you’ve just done is designed to meet your single objective for that page, site, tool or whatever it is you’re working on. 

If you imagine the banana next to the save button often enough, it will become the trigger for checking your design against your objective every time you save your work.

Don’t Make the Same Mistakes

Now that you know the secret as to why there’s so many terrible websites out there, don’t go making the same mistakes.

• Stick to a single objective
• Make it easy to accomplish
• Keep reminding yourself of your objective during the design
• Remember the monkey and its banana

Follow those steps and you’ll be ditching the clutter and rubbish and consistently designing focused, optimised websites that generate more leads and conversions.

Website accessibility is all about making sure anyone and everyone can access your website. There are many users out there who have disabilities or may be using devices that require additional accommodations. That being said, some things that can be done to improve accessibility will improve the user experience for everyone. Check out these tips on how to optimize your website accessibility:

Ensure your color scheme has an appropriate amount of contrast.

Color blindness is a very common condition among users. Make sure that your color scheme has enough contrast so that people with color blindness can still distinguish what exactly is on the page. Tools like colorfilter.wickline.org help to mimic colorblindness on your website so that you can see where to make changes.

Utilize alternative content where necessary.

Alternative content is useful for users with vision/hearing problems.  Alternative content means using text for non-text content. For instance, using words to describe images, or including transcripts along with videos for users who are hard of hearing. A text only version of your website can also be useful for users with slower internet connections or devices that are outdated.

Utilize skip links.

Skip links allow speech software to skip over links/navigation items that are repeated on every page. This is useful for people who are vision impaired and don’t want to listen to the same menu items being repeated on every page. Skip links allow users to skip over repetitive links so that they can access the primary page content.

Explain Select Menus.

The default value on select menus should describe what the menu is intended for. For instance, if a form is asking for your bodyweight it should label the default value of the select menu as ‘select body weight’ instead of leaving it blank or including number with no explanation. This will help to ensure everyone clearly understands the purpose of forms and fields.

Use descriptive link names.

Use descriptive links whenever you can! A link that says ‘click here’ isn’t nearly as useful as ‘click here to download Windows 2010.’ When in doubt, be more descriptive. 

Website usability is essentially the ease of use of a website. There are a variety of factors that go into usability including things like font, page load times, site search accessibility etc. It's important to ensure a high degree of usability so that more users can easily access and utilize your website. So how do you improve website usability?

Keep load times reasonable.

 Users are going to go to another website if a page takes too long to load. Users are fickle. They aren't going to sit around waiting for your website to perform better.

Use an easy to read font/color scheme.

What good is a website if a user can't read any of the content on it? Pick a normal font and color scheme to make life easy on your users. The last thing you want to do is burn your customers' retinas.

Intuitive navigation.

Another important factor in website usability is employing an intuitive navigation system. Make sure all the important sections of your website are easy to find and access in the nav system. It's important to also ensure that your nav system isn't overly complicated. Don't include too many menu items. Stick to the basics to keep it as streamlined as possible. 

Keep copy concise and explanatory.

A website with a high degree of usability makes great use of its copy. It's concise, easily digested, and very informative. There isn't much filler to discourage or frustrate users.

Make sure headings are clear and descriptive. 

People don't read website copy word for word. They skim and scan the entire page for what's important. That's why using clear and descriptive headings is useful. They can often replace a long-winded paragraph, and are much more user friendly. Would you rather read a sentence or five sentences to understand the same message? Exactly.

Make URLs meaningful and user-friendly.

Using meaningful URLs that have keywords in them can be helpful for users and search engines alike. They can help users understand where they are within a website, or the purpose of a page. 

Web design is a constantly evolving profession. There are new trends and technology popping up with regularity. As things change, it is important to take note of what you should and shouldn't do while designing a website. We are going to focus on what you shouldn't do. For example:

1. Making the design too flashy.

You know what they say, sometimes less is more. Everyone wants to create a website that wows people. That doesn't mean you need to jam pack it with tons of videos, images, and effects. You don't want to be overbearing and make your client's website look like a 13 year old's MySpace page. There's a reason minimalism has made a comeback recently. 

2. Not making a website responsive.

Not making a website design responsive can create a huge competitive disadvantage for any business. Users aren't just using computers to access the Internet. They're using phones, tablets, game consoles, and more. Mobile browsing is exploding in popularity. If your client can't afford a responsive design that's one thing. You should definitely recommend it if they can though!

3. Creating a confusing navigation system.

Having a confusing navigation system is like trying to figure out a terrible map. It can become virtually impossible to figure out where you need to go, and create a ton of frustration for anyone using it. You need to keep the navigation as simple and streamlined as possible. More options can create more confusion. Focus on what is essential for the user, and make important pages easy to access.

4. Using hard to read fonts.

There are some pretty cool, crazy looking fonts out there. That doesn't mean you should use them for a public facing website. Users need to be able to read what's on a web page without having to strain themselves. That means picking standard fonts and colors. That means no wingdings and no neon colored letters. Make life as easy as possible for users' eyes.

Custom web design is a great way to build your online business presence. Instead of reading another article on the benefits and features of custom design, we found some great infographics for you! Check them out:

H/T to CoolInfoImages.com , MediaMarketers.com , Ocean19.com , TheNinjaWeb.com