Functionality VS Design: How to Implement both into your Website
What we’ll teach you:
What is website functionality and why is it important?
What do we mean by website design?
Where do websites usually go wrong with the two?
How we design sites that blend both
What is website functionality?
A websites function is based on how well it prioritises the user's experience when they’re visiting your site. Does your website have consistent and well placed CTA’s? Is the navigation system logical and easy to use? Is your content delivery structured to guide the visitor through your key information? Components like these are all important to make sure that your site has a high level of functionality. They make the user have an easy time on your site… that’s what we want, right? We don’t want users clicking off because they can’t find what they’re looking for, or get frustrated with confusing layouts. This is why website functionality is important, it means that visitors can easily understand your business and ultimately stay on your site for longer making them more likely to engage with your CTA’s.
What’s website design, then?
Website design is what makes your site not look like a Word Document. Everything from the colours, fonts, images, graphics, textures, illustrations…ignore the functionality components, it’s all the fun stuff! Wait… ignore the functionality components - that right there is where we have a problem!
This is where websites go wrong…
When you ignore the functionality of a website to prioritise the design, you’ll probably end up with a pretty cool, but pretty useless website. We all know that it’s important for a site to express your brand’s creativity and engage your visitors, but when this is to the detriment of functionality your visitors will get overwhelmed, frustrated and the chances of them engaging with your CTA’s, filling out enquiry forms or purchasing your products are slim-to-none. Therefore, when designing it’s important to always have the user experience in mind, so that your website can be utilised as the useful tool that it has the potential to be!
So, how do we design websites that blend both?
We’ve spent a long ol’ time understanding how to blend both design and functionality to create sites that not only function well and look amazing, but also use the advantages of website design to complement functionality. Here are 5 things we do to ensure we always prioritise the user:
1. What would the user intuitively do?
By thinking about what would be intuitive to the user will ensure that you always make decisions based on what will be easiest and make most sense to the user. This might be things like, placing your main CTA in the top right corner as that’s where users will intuitively look for it, or having your contact details in the footer. You should also use elements of your design features to complement this, such as having all of your CTA buttons in the same font and colour!
2. Consider your colours!
Speaking of colours, we love to use bright and bold colours on our websites, but placing them carefully is everything. We use the 60 30 10 rule with our colour palettes to ensure that bright colours don’t becoming overbearing. Also, its so important to ensure that your colours are passing the colour contrast guidelines so that your sit is legible and accessible to all.
3. Consistent Layouts
When designing the components of a website, we repeat similar layouts and components across the pages to make sure that they are conclusive to each other. Having this predictability is important for visitors and stops them from becoming overwhelmed by strikingly different pages. This is also beneficial to allow space for amazing design in specified containers without it disrupting text and important information.
4. Guide your visitors
When a user clicks on one of our sites we want our visitors to be guided through key information and naturally arrive at the CTA’s - think of it as a journey. Carefully consider the order of information as your site progresses so that you answer your visitors questions as they naturally think of them. By doing so, conversion is much more likely! Graphics and design have a big role to play here because you can use them to visually display your information to avoid the user becoming bored of big chunks of text.
5. Animations are there to engage!
Animations are great for catching your visitors eyes and making them look or read something first - think about how a notification appears on your phone, of course your eyes naturally glance at it. We can use the same advantage in our websites by using animations to control our users eyes and perception of our websites.
How to learn more about website functionality and design.
Of course, this is only the beginning of how to blend both functionality and design and it takes a good while to master. If you’d like to learn more give us a shout as we’d love to host a webinar to explain this in more detail.
Or, if you’d rather not think about any of this, let us do the thinking for you - head over to our get started button and we’ll take care of the rest.
