OK, so nobody wants to go to a website and be submerged immediately with huge amounts of text, animations, images and overwhelming colour schemes. They want to come to your site to pin-point, in the quickest and easiest way possible, what piece of information they are trying to retrieve, whilst maintaining a clear, impacting design visual.
So, in order for the person visiting your site to find that piece of information they need; the design to target specific areas of key information in a way that is succinct. However, how can you have a minimalistic design with a few sentences of text and expect to be found in a search engine? Big problem.
Overcoming this problem and getting a nice balance between design and SEO can be a huge task for any designer out there, but there are solutions. Search engines require your content, but your designs don’t want to display huge blocks of text which will inevitably distract the reader away from your site. Therefore way’s around this problem can be through so called “hiding” of text. An excellent example of this can be found on e64′s new website design. Instead of cluttering the home page with chunks of text we have decided to highlight the key areas using bullet points, behind a drop down tab. Please refer to the example below:
An example of hidden text
Not only has this reduced the amount of text being displayed in large paragraphs, but it has also strayed away from impacting the design elements, and if anything freed up more space for other text. Other ways in which you can prevent your site from becoming too dependent on textual information is by using pop-outs and various other useful tools that not only add great functionality to your site, but ultimately keeps to the minimalistic look that you are hoping to achieve, without impacting search engines.
I have noticed recently, through my research, that the trend for minimalistic website design is rapidly increasing, more than ever! New approaches are being taken to displaying what the client want’s in a clear and understanding way, without impacting them all important search engine statistics. Keeping up with new approaches to website design can be a difficult task, however a task that can be extremely beneficial to aesthetically pleasing web design and, more importantly, the overall success of your website; from getting found on Google to keeping your visitors on your site.
Below are some tasters into some of my recent design projects. I have aimed to achieve an aesthetically pleasing website, whilst maintaining understanding of the importance of SEO.
RedFern
Preview for RedFern Design and Build
IJM Media
Preview for IJM Media
To conclude; when pulling together ideas for your new website design remember to focus on the smaller things that will have a bigger impact on the overall usability and aesthetics.
Remember – Less is More.
