Are you old enough to recall the early days of the World Wide Web in the early ’90s? If so, you probably have lingering memories of the rudimentary appearance of websites of the time, compared to today’s much more aesthetically slick and sophisticated online portals.
Reassuringly, web design techniques have advanced leaps and bounds since then, allowing modern webmasters to communicate essential details in many different ways.
If you wish to tell a riveting story through your website, you can even use design components to do it, as the following examples show.
Let your visitor form their own online persona
When you watch a great film or book, it’s possible to relate to the lead character so strongly that you can easily imagine yourself in your shoes, effectively making yourself the hero.
Unless you feel emotionally invested in a given character, you probably won’t be greatly eager to follow their journey.
You can take inspiration from this for your website by allowing the visitor to create their own persona – complete with an avatar and detailed profile – that they can use when exploring the site.
Carefully select images to guide the visitor through a story
You might not have known that people are 22 times likelier to remember data when it is presented to them in a narrative form. Furthermore, as we digest visual material at a 60% faster pace than textual content, you shouldn’t overlook visual elements like video and animation.
You could incorporate the above media into your site as chunks of a visually-told story. If your company offers package holidays to exotic locations, for example, photographs of the destinations could show prospective holidaymakers where they could take steps for real.
Symbols enable you to use mobile screen space more effectively
Apple recently grabbed headlines when it launched the iPhone XS Max with a supposedly monstrously large screen. However, the device’s display actually measures only 6.5 inches diagonally, which still makes it much smaller than the average laptop screen.
The continued popularity of smartphones means web designers have to keep asking themselves how they can communicate information effectively within limited real estate.
However, easily recognisable symbols can effectively convey all manner of information to visitors within a small amount of space. One obvious example of this is the hamburger menu button, which takes the form of three horizontal bars meant to resemble a collapsed navigational menu.
Would you like your own organisation’s new website to embrace techniques like the above for concisely communicating vital information and telling a story? If so, you may wish to enquire to our skilled and seasoned website design professionals about how they can help.
