Simplicity is the key

When you consider starting a new web project for a design, interface or management system, common mistakes made preparing those is that as time progresses, you will eventually decide to add more features, more elements, more information, functionality and so forth. It is not wrong to add more and more to a website; but it is wrong to add unnecessary clutter to a website. It will make it harder to browse, and harder to get used to. Visitors would be overwhelmed by a lot of things they don’t want to see or do, and eventually it’s a turn-off. Here are a few tips to making that work better for you.

Put emphasis on content that matters
Get realistic; a big amount of visitors, would prefer to find what they need for now. In the future, they will know your website is trustful, and might recognize it a second time when they search for something. Or better yet, they will bookmark your page the first time! Try putting emphasis on content that matters. What does that mean? Anything that you know only a few people would care about, can go in a smaller font, be faded out, or as a footer/small sidebar for example. Look at all the greatest websites and bloggers: Any ‘share’ options are put aside to leave room for the main article or section to be more easily seen and noticed.

Less clutter ≠ less features
Make as many features as you want. Heck, put more features than anyone would ever use. But use them right. Know where to place the features, and know how to keep them hidden to those that don’t use them, while visible to anyone that looks for them. For example: I’m making a website for product reviews. Suggesting reviews are public for anyone who signs up; I need to keep the features organized right. I would prefer to keep any reviewing or editing tools available to only those who need to see them, and even then, only keep them when the user wants to. So I might make a dropdown for reviewing tools instead of keeping it visible at all times.

Conclusion is that features have an important role in managing interest for your visitors: but keep it right and keep everything in place. Hopefully main content will get the recognition it deserves when you design your website.

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