Essential Elements: Easy Navigation for Effective Website Conversion
Why Minimalism?
Minimalism essentially means decreasing all the elements to only focus or include the ones that are most essential. This idea is to bring about greater attention to the purpose.
The idea is to limit or reduce the unnecessary noise and obstruction of focus due to other distracting elements. We often see successful branding using minimalism to effectively convey their message and show up in the overall design.
Take Apple for example:
Apple’s brand is one of the best examples of having a minimalist approach in mind when designing products. The design is clean and sleek and sophisticated, which creates a feeling of what their customer experience would be.
Minimalist designs are visually appealing and user-friendly, so it’s really not surprising that so many businesses prefer to have a minimalist web design, as it helps them boost their company’s bottom line by being much more conversion-friendly.
Taking The Minimalist Approach to Web Design
Your company’s website is the best business card you have. The purpose of it is to convey to your customers, and potential customers, everything they need to know (emphasis on the need to know) about your business; where to find you to what the business is all about, your services, etc.
Websites that are not functional, take a long time to load, have too many distractions or are not user-friendly. This causes people to bounce or leave the site.
If your visitors don’t stick around long enough to know who you are or what you do, they won’t actually get to know you or understand what you have to offer.
It’s a waste.
Instead of overcrowding your website with elements that are not necessary, feature only the most essential ones. Below we discuss the most important design elements you must consider to create a functional and minimalist site.
How To Create a Minimalist Website
There really are just three areas that you need to focus on and make decisions on, in terms of the design to make it minimalistic.
- The Visual Elements
- The Colour Scheme
- Amount of White Space
However, here are some general guidelines to consider for each.
The Visual Elements
- Focus on functionality and the purpose (is it strictly visual or is it useful to have?)
- Graphics and details need to be appealing vs. distracting and again purposeful.
- Videos are more engaging than a single image and serve a purpose (to inform)
- Are images and videos optimized so that it doesn’t affect load time?
- Consider how much copy is on the site. Too little can miss the message, too much and no one will read it (use as little as possible but get your point across)
- Navigation should be easy to understand and use
- Choose a background image that represents the brand
The Colours Scheme
- Limit the use of colours to two or three key colours
- Use a monochromatic colour palette to capture the eye vs. overwhelm it
- If you want to apply contrasting colours, this can work too, however in that case it’s recommended to incorporate white as a neutral as well.
Amount of White Space
- Also referred to as “negative space”, this is used to reduce the visible clutter and give the site some room. Use it to guide the attention of the visitor.
- Increase white space around the information you want to focus on
- Don’t have too many focal points on one view
- Don’t create a page where the user doesn’t know where to focus on
These are some very simple and basic tips on creating a minimalist website that can work to your advantage if executed well.
A lot of these websites that are “clean” tend to convert nicely based on how easy it is for the user to obtain the information they need and find out where they should go for their next steps.
If you are looking to build a new website, contact us directly for a consultation. We are happy to make recommendations.
