User Experience In Construction Web Design
User experience, or UX, refers to the overall feeling a person gets when using a website or an app, from their initial visit to post-purchase or post-hire follow-up. A great UX can make customers satisfied and loyal to your brand, but a bad UX will drive them away.
For construction websites, there’s a lot that goes into ensuring that the interactions between customers and the site itself are smooth and pleasant. Some of these elements of user experience include:
- User interface (UI) – This is the part of the website that visitors see and interact with, and it needs to be visually appealing and user-friendly.
- Information architecture – This refers to the blueprints of the website and how information is organized and presented.
- Usability – This refers to how easy it is for users to find what they’re looking for on the website.
Professional construction web design has to happen with user experience in mind. That’s why there are many techniques and tools used to improve UX, including user research, user testing, A/B testing, and heuristic evaluation. These tools can help web designers understand how users interact with a website and make the necessary adjustments.
Why is user experience important in construction web design?
1. Better SEO ranking
Google’s algorithms have evolved so much lately that keyword stuffing and long articles are not nearly enough to get you the coveted #1 spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Now, Google actively ranks websites that provide the best information and experience to their visitors.
With the marriage of great UX and SEO strategies, you can increase site traffic and get more visitors who love to visit your site and are interested in your service. The longer people spend on your site signals to Google that you put your users first, and they respond by boosting your rankings.
2. Better conversion rate
No matter what aspect of construction you specialize in, there are bound to be other companies (with websites) that offer the exact same thing. However, if your website offers a better user experience than your competitors, your visitors will be more likely to choose you over them.
This is confirmed by UserZoom’s report, State of UX 2022, where product marketers claim that the prioritization of user experience improved conversions by nearly 40%.
3. Increase in trust and credibility
Many people judge the authenticity and credibility of a company by their website. Many scammers don’t bother to make their sites aesthetically pleasing, so doing that for your site goes a long way in getting your visitors to trust you.
When visitors trust you, they’re more likely to book calls, get in touch, and hire you to do work for them. But if your website is so confusing and unappealing that they can’t seem to find the Contact button, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
Key factors that influence user experience in construction web design
1. Navigation
Navigation is an important part of web design because it organizes information in a way that is easy for users to find quickly. The most prominent type of website navigation is the navigation bar (or menu). This is an organized set of links that guide visitors to important pages on the website.
While the links in the navigation bar are the most important ones on the website, navigation actually encompasses how all your web pages are connected together (through both internal and external links).
Good navigation also allows search engine bots to crawl and index your website better, which makes it easier for users to find your site through search queries.
If the navigation system is bad, visitors would bounce (i.e. visit only one webpage and go off the site without visiting other pages), and search engine bots may not find and rank some of your pages.
2. Website Speed
- Speed is a search engine ranking factor for both desktop and mobile searches.
- As page load time increases from 1 second to 10 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 123%.
What this means is that the speed at which your site loads has a huge effect on how well your site performs on the SERPs and how long people peruse your site. Add that to the fact that 53% of people would click off a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Bad performance on the SERPs leads to reduced visibility, and high bounce leads to lower conversions — both of which are terrible for a construction business.
That’s why you should optimize your website for speed. Before you take any steps, however, run your site URL through tools like GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights to find out what’s causing your website to load slowly.
Here are some steps you can take to increase your site speed:
- Compress your images: Construction websites tend to have a lot of images, because of the portfolio you have to show prospects. But too many images on a site can cause it to lag badly.Fix this by compressing your images with tools like TinyPNG or Bulk Resize Photos before uploading them. If you’re using WordPress as your content management system (CMS), install compression plugins like WP Smush and ShortPixel, which will compress all the images on your site at once without compromising quality.
- Minify HTML, CSS, JavaScript: By combining or minifying your HTML, CSS, and JS files, you can increase your site speed. You can either manually remove commas, spaces, unnecessary characters, and duplicate codes or download plugins, like Autoptimize and WP Super Minify, to help you with minification.
- Cache your web pages: Normally, every time a visitor lands on your site, your server has to completely reload every file on the site, which when repeated too many times, can cause the site to load slowly. But when you cache your website, copies of your site’s files are stored, so that when a visitor comes to your site, your server doesn’t have to reload the entire page.
- Use a content distribution network (CDN): A CDN is a network of servers that distributes the load of delivering website content. When you use a CDN, copies of your site are stored at multiple data centers all over the world, so visitors can quickly get access to your site from the server located closest to them. This reduces the load (and time) that one server would have, in the absence of a CDN, taken to distribute your content.
- Delete unnecessary plugins: Too many activated plugins on your website can slow it down. So if you have a lot of plugins, scroll through and delete the ones that are not necessary. Also, delete plugins that are outdated or take up a lot of space. In the latter case, find alternative plugins that take up lesser space.
3. Usability
Usability refers to the ease at which visitors are able to find information and achieve their goals on a given website. For example, a usable construction website makes it easy for visitors to find out the name of the company, what the company specializes in, a portfolio of previous work, customer testimonials, and a form/email/phone number through which they can contact the company.
To make your website usable, you need to know what your users are looking for when they land on your site. When you know this, you’ll be able to design your website in a way they’d appreciate.
4. Accessibility
- Use ALT tags
- Offer alternative ways to consume multimedia
- Use good color contrast
- Make text content readable
5. Information Architecture
Information Architecture, or IA, is the practice of organizing the elements of a website, in a way that’s easy to understand.
Just like architects use blueprints to construct a house, from the physical building to complex functions, like plumbing and electrical wiring, website designers use IA to describe the navigation, hierarchy, and interactions of a website.
To create the IA of a website, the designer has to think of two things: the user’s context and the user’s needs.
Information Architecture is crucial to user experience because it provides structure and simplifies complex information for visitors. This makes it easy for them to understand your services and reach their goals.
6. Content strategy
Content strategy in user experience refers to the distribution of site content to the right people at the right time in the right format. A good content strategy encompasses everything on a site, including text, images, audio, and video, and presents it in a manner that is accessible and usable for the target audience.
7. Branding
Branding is the process of forging a distinctive image for a company. Branding for construction companies covers the look of your website (color palette, typography, and iconography) and the persona and tone of your company as perceived by your ideal clients.
With great branding, you’ll be able to distinguish your company from your competitors and make it more memorable to people who find you online. More importantly, cohesive site branding tells people that your business is trustworthy.
It would be impossible to detail every little thing that you should keep in mind when creating your social media content. But the most important thing is to trust your own intuition. In general, if something makes you hesitate, you probably shouldn’t post it.
User Experience In Construction Web Design FAQ
What are the best practices for creating a user-friendly construction website?
- Let your branding, including colors, graphics, and typefaces, be cohesive, consistent, and simple.
- Make your website responsive and accessible on all devices, including mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- Let your website navigation system be intuitive, i.e. primary navigation should be at the top of the page, secondary navigation should be at the footer, and webpages should interlink smoothly with one another.
- Organize your website elements so that visitors will gravitate towards the most important elements first.
- Make your website accessible to people with disabilities. Get more information about how to improve your website accessibility from The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
- Be transparent about your company and the services you offer clients.
How does website speed affect user experience in construction web design, and how can it be optimized?
- Choose a good web hosting platform
- Compress your images
- Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
- Cache your web pages
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Delete unnecessary plugins
Aaron R. - CEO
Entrepreneur with 20 years experience launching and managing successful web design and marketing companies. As seen in New York Times, Inc.com, Smashing Magazine, Home Advisor and other various mainstream media.
Passionate about #seo #marketing #webdesign #socialmedia #blogging #family #texasbbq
