User experience is critical to curating engagement on your website. If your site is hard to navigate, confusing to use, or simply bogged down with slow loading speeds and errors, visitors are going to run away and never come back.
Capturing your community’s attention is more challenging than ever before. You have precious seconds to grab the attention of your website visitors before they lose interest and bounce right off your site and find one another nonprofit to support.
Much like how you welcome guests in your home, your site should greet your visitors with a warm smile, offer them comfy slippers, a cup of tea, and tour them around the premises. Everything in a user-friendly website is easy to find, conveniently located, emphasizes the key areas, is effectively arranged, and is well described.
Good usability boosts donor satisfaction and converts visitors. Sounds appealing, right? Let’s go through a few pointers for making your website user-friendly. Here are some of the easy-to-follow guidelines.
1. Pay Attention to Your Users
Actively seek out what your frequent visitors want to see on your website. Obtaining direct feedback from your intended audience can enable you to identify lacking aspects you may not have seen on your own. Users usually have a good idea of what they might not like about a site. It’s your responsibility to positively transform those negative comments by addressing visitors’ issues with your site.
2. Make the Site’s Navigation Simple
When a user arrives on a website, they frequently use the navigation bar to get a sense of where they are on the page. The navigation bar is necessary since it accompanies the site visitor during their stay and provides a means of returning to the landing page.
Simultaneously, you need to keep the number of categories in your navigation menu to a minimum to avoid overcomplicating it. It would be best if you kept it in the exact placement on every page. And most importantly, pull out your “Donate” button from the main navigation to make it stand out.
3. Make Your Website’s Content Simple to Read or Skim
You must consider the readability of your website’s content. Remember that most people will not read your content from beginning to end, and most will only scan over it, so they should be able to grasp your information fast.
Readable fonts, careful color selection, highlighting in vital areas, clear headers, subheadings, bulleted or numbered lists, paragraph segmentation with no lengthy slabs of text, excellent equilibrium among texts and pictures, layouts with proper columns, and more will be your handy helpers here.
4. Optimize the Speed of Your Website
If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you risk losing 40% of your visitors. Eliminate any extra elements which are no longer in use to help your site load faster. Your site can drastically slow down if you use old code with broken plugins, have locally hosted videos on your page, or don’t optimize your images for the web. Most websites contain extra components that are unnecessary or no longer in use. Take the time to ensure that you clean up your site and get rid of unused or unnecessary elements that could slow it down.
There are numerous methods for accomplishing this — image optimization, CSS and JS aggregation to reduce server requests, effective caching techniques, image lazy loading, web font optimization, implementing the AMP standard, eliminating unnecessary CMS modules or plugins, etc.
If you’re not a web development pro, don’t risk editing your site’s code on your own — reach out to a reputable web design agency to conduct a complete website efficiency audit, identify and address your site’s flaws, and optimize your site to bring in the traffic you’ve been missing.
5. Choose a Single Color Palette
A flawless combination of cohesive branding and navigational simplicity is required to have a truly user-friendly site. Not only must your color scheme be appropriate for your business, but the contrast between the background and the content must be sufficient for the users to see them without straining their eyes.
Utilize a simple color scheme instead of an overcomplicated palette. Simple, smart color choices keep things cohesive and help maintain brand consistency across your site and other marketing materials. Choose a palette that best identifies and symbolizes your company. Ensure that the colors used in your logo are also used in your other promotional materials.
6. Include Links to Your Social Networking Sites
A solid link with the business’s social media profiles is another feature of a user-friendly website. Your users will be more inclined to share your material, like your page, or join your community if you include social media icons that make it easy for them to verify your web presence and recognize your brand as trustworthy and established.
7. Enhance the Appearance and Functionality of Your Website
Bear in mind that most people nowadays use mobile devices to visit websites. Around 80% of netizens have a smartphone and are increasingly using their phones to access the Internet — notably, as data rates have decreased and limitless bandwidth has become the norm.
A responsive design is essential in 2022 and beyond. Is your website appealing on both desktop and mobile devices? Does it provide an easy-to-use and streamlined user experience (UX)? If not, you could be losing out on countless visitors due to not only the experience on your site but also Google ranking your site lower than mobile-friendly competitors in the rankings.
8. Incorporate Call-To-Action Buttons That Are Visible and Easily Accessible
Your visitors shouldn’t have to think about their next action if you’ve used UX design features to guide them where you want them to go. With clearly worded calls-to-action on visible buttons, located in which they are logically anticipated, and accentuated with color schemes and contrast, persuade your potential customers to add an item to a cart, purchase your services, subscribe to your newsletter, drop you a note, and so on.
9. Address Any Bugs or Links That Aren’t Working
Bugs and broken links are the worst enemies of a site’s user-friendliness. Your website requires thorough testing to identify any essential functions flaws. Broken links, which can occur for various causes, require locating specialized tools. Perform a comprehensive clean-up to ensure your audience gets a consistent experience across your entire site.
Now Is the Time to Make Your Website User-Friendly!
Whether you have spent countless hours on your current website and don’t want all the hard work to go to waste, or you’ve built a recognizable brand and don’t want to confuse your customers with a new look, we understand.
Your website is an asset, not an expense. At Buzzworks Creations, we create a strategy that will keep leads coming back with fresh content and relevant information so your site never becomes stale or outdated. Our websites work hard to build your brand recognition and foster loyalty. Book your consultation today, and let’s create buzz around your nonprofit.