Hello, this is Mikel Bruce with TinyFrog Technologies. Today I want to talk a little bit about less the concept of less is more and how it applies to a website which is actually really important because most companies when they’re creating their website, they have a tendency or an inclination to want to put everything in the website or as much as possible and what tends to happen is that you can very easily overwhelm the website visitor.
Most people who land on a website don’t want to or won’t spend a lot of time, so you have to be very discerning and very discreet in terms of what you put on the website.
So, the things you really want to focus are first, is the number of pages. There was a time where you’d go to, many companies would have 15, 20, 25, 30 pages with many dropdowns and it can be very overwhelming and most people won’t go through that many pages so it’s really important to have as few pages in the navigation as possible when considering putting together your sitemap and your organization of pages. So less is more definitely applies to that.
Second thing is the content on the page. Most people nowadays, they don’t tend to read, they tend to scan and scroll and skim, so we recommend using high level messaging which are like headlines, sub headlines, bullets, versus dense content like long paragraphs. Again, most people won’t read that and it will tend to overwhelm them and if they get overwhelmed or if they feel like there’s too much they may just leave the website.
Third thing is images, it’s really important to have good imagery on your website. But again using it discerning, using real high-quality imagery versus having images all over the place.
Another area is animation, a lot of websites nowadays will have moving, things moving, to make the website more interesting and dynamic, which can be very helpful because it can draw people’s attention to certain areas but if you have too much content, too much animation and movement on the website, it can actually be a distraction and we actually refer to that is visual bullying. So, that’s another area you want to be discerning where you’re putting in terms of how much animation is on your website.
And the other thing is forms, a lot of websites nowadays will have 10 or 15 forms with a lot of content on and a lot of fields on each form. We recommend having maybe one main form and then a call the action form and having as few fields as possible because if someone comes to a website that has a lot of fields in the form, they may actually not fill it out, so typically just having a name, email, maybe company name, phone number and a comment section would be more than enough for a call to action form.
So, definitely when you’re putting together your plan for your website, consider having less on your website versus more. Thank you!
