When designing or renewing your custom financial advisor website, it may be easy to get lost in aesthetics. You may find yourself asking questions like “Is this the right shade of blue?” or “which font should we use?” While these details might make a difference in the long run, this is a world with over 1.8 billion websites to view and a rapidly decreasing judgment time for users. This is why usability, or user experience, plays such a critical role in the website design and development process. Do visitors enjoy interacting with your website? Here’s how to produce a website that is user-friendly and meets all your aesthetic goals!
1. Simplicity
Would you believe that visitors are turned away by complex sites? Chances are, they are not visiting your website for the sheer pleasure of looking at the cool design. These visitors, especially in the financial market, want readily-available information that is easy to navigate. When implementing this, we recommend simplifying basic elements such as colors, fonts, and graphics.
Colors
When choosing colors, the golden rule is to choose 3. You will want to have the main color, an accent color, and a neutral color. Think of Coca-Cola, you would never see a package without red and they have created one of the most well-known brands. Your colors can make your brand, but there’s also no such thing as choosing the “wrong colors”. Stay simple and use the help of your design team, they can help direct where colors fall on your webpage. At a maximum, we recommend using 5 colors in your design.
Fonts
The most important thing to remember is that all fonts should be highly legible. No matter how pretty or creative a typeface is, if visitors cannot read it- it is useless. This also applies to text colors. If you can hardly make out what it says, chances are there’s a percentage of visitors who have no clue what it says.
Graphics
Graphics are terrific assets to any design, but too many graphics will overwhelm your visitors and might even take away from the user experience. With the right CPA website design company, the graphics are tailored to add to the design, rather than overcrowd it.
2. Visual Hierarchy
Imagine you could be there with each visitor directing them to the best parts of your website, that would be nice. Luckily, you can arrange and organize your page to guide your audience with the principle of visual hierarchy, naturally leading each visitor to the most important information. Size and color are tools that can help direct your visitors. A good way to test this is to show someone your website who has never seen it before, maybe a friend or family member and just ask them to name the elements that stand out, if it doesn’t align with your hopes, change it up.
3. Navigability
When a visitor first views your website, there should be no question as to where they should go next. Whether they are checking credibility, need an answer to a question, or are viewing what your firm has to offer. You can make it easy on them with intuitive navigation planning. Here’s a list of tips to organize navigability as simply as possible.
- Primary navigation should be simple and at the top of the page
- Include navigation in the footer, even if it leads back to the top of the page.
- Utilize breadcrumbs to aid visitors in their navigation trail
- Search bars are helpful tools that make a world of difference in navigation
- Offering too many navigation options is counter-productive
- Try including the use of links to help navigate visitors, such as a button that says “learn more” that links to a page about that subject.
- Utilize a wireframe map for your website when planning and remember that nobody wants to go digging for information
4. Consistency
After keeping everything simple, the most important attribute of a website is consistency. This can prevent a lot of easy mistakes to make. Consistency is proven to have an impact on user experience and website usability, some things that should remain consistent throughout the site are colors, fonts, sizes, writing styles, and style of graphics. One tip to make this an easy process is to use the same layout across pages.
5. Responsivity
Responsivity is a monumental game-changer in today’s world. Of the population browsing the web, nearly half are on their mobile phones at 48% according to a study by Statista and 93% of users have left a website because it didn’t display properly on their phone. This includes the majority of mobile users, which means that you have an excellent chance of conveying your message effectively if you adapt your website to be mobile-friendly. Financial advisor website design services should know to make a website mobile adaptive before publishing the website and if you love your site but want more responsivity, Financial Website Company offers mobile adaptation of your site with no extra steps necessary. If you would like to learn more, contact Financial Website Company at https://financialwebsitecompany.com/contact-us/
