5 Ways to Make Your Site’s Design Scannable
As you design your website, it’s tempting to focus on flash and glamour to attract potential customers. Visual appeal is important, but great design is more than just moving parts, bright colors, and beautiful images. Let’s take a look at the importance of maintaining scannability in your website’s design. How can it make your website not just visually appealing, but user-friendly as well?
Why is Scannability Important in Design?
We aren’t saying to ignore the pizazz you want to put into your site, but cluttering up your pages kills its usability. Modern site visitors are looking for specific information. If they can’t find what they need quickly, they split—and your bounce rates go through the roof. Visitors should be able to visit your site, quickly scroll, and almost immediately find the paragraph or information that satisfies their search intent. When this happens, it means a few things for your brand:
- Your website is user-friendly
- You’ve likely developed trust between your brand and your audience
- Word of mouth for your excellent site leads to increased traffic.
Therefore, a great UX puts you on the right track for improved Google rankings and industry authority. That all sounds pretty great, right? Fortunately, it’s not difficult to create a website that is easy for the eyes to follow.
How to Build Your Site for Scannability
Here are six quick tips to keep in mind when discussing ideas with your web designer.
1. Design With Visual Hierarchy in Mind
Visual hierarchy helps guide the eye towards the most important aspects of your site. Typically, you can accomplish visual hierarchy through design choices that highlight your sites’ key information throughout the structure of your website. Some examples of creating a visual hierarchy include the following:
- Large Titles
- Use of Headers
- Strong or Bold Text
- Large Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons
- Strong Text
- Contrasting Color Design
2. Make Your Navigation Menu Easy to Spot
Your navigation menu points visitors towards where they need to go on your website. Don’t force guests to hunt for the menu! Make sure it’s front and center for your audience to easily find. The best place for your navigation menu is in the website header. That’s because the eye starts to look at a site from the top down. If the first thing visitors see is your brand name, followed by a brief and clear navigation menu, your site automatically becomes easier to scan. Remember, you want to limit the number of choices a guest has to make on your site. So, if you are an eCommerce site with several options available in your navigation menu, it’s a good idea to add a search bar near the top of your site that saves users time. 
3. Take Advantage of White Space
Many novice designers think they have to use up every inch of space available on their website. We say, take a deep breath and enjoy the benefits of using negative space to your advantage. These blank areas around your content break it up into digestible chunks. Combined with the hierarchical elements, white space is probably one of the most important features you could have on your website to promote intuitive scanning.
4. Write for Brevity
As you can see, space is precious on your website, so use it wisely. Every paragraph you write should be brief and to the point. Short paragraphs are easy to digest and should present a valuable idea within their body. Therefore, ensure you create great content with something to say, and that you’ve trimmed the fat off of your ideas prior to hitting “publish!”
5. Use Numbers Where Possible
Numbers literally stand out in a crowd of text and draw attention to their figures. Numbers stop the eye because our minds immediately associate them with important data. Users easily overlook numbers in text form. So, whenever you have an important number to share with your audience, use digits to lead them towards your valuable information.
Make Your Website Eye-Catching With Big D Creative
If you’re ready to create a website that looks beautiful and serves its purpose, the design team at Big D Creative is here to help! We’ve successfully created websites for businesses from all industries and are eager to bring your vision to life. Contact us today to learn more about our design services and to schedule your free consultation with a member of our team.