In the final article in our series on Singapore web design tips we look at accessibility and mobile responsive design.
5. Ignoring Accessibility
Accessibility is another extremely important aspect of web design. Overlooking it has a serious effect on the results which your website achieves. For the last few years, numerous companies have been recognizing just how important it is to make their websites accessible to users with a wide range of abilities and impairments.
Of course, there is a moral obligation to make your website accessible to as broad of a range of people as possible. However, there’s also a strong business incentive for providing the widest feasible access to your site. Expanding your audience could only boost your chances for making successful sales, of course.
Even if there are no legal requirements for your site to be widely accessible at this time, it is likely industry standards could require it sometime in the near future. A website which was not originally designed to be accessible will require a time-consuming and expensive overhaul to be retroactively adapted for accessibility.
Therefore, it is wise to begin thinking of ways to use imagery, text, and sound throughout your website designs prior to their creation. Consider including audio descriptions, keeping copy well-spaced, using sans serif, a more legible font, and adding alt tags on images. If you are featuring videos, instead of using auto settings, allow users a choice of pressing play or not. Also, conduct user experience research to study the experience you would like to create.
If you design with accessibility as a priority in your planning, then more creative, innovative, and logically designed websites will come to fruition. You will savor the freedom of experimenting with design trends, but will insure that the designs will be implemented with purpose. Good designing should never limit exposure so you should strive for website designs that are as widely accessible as possible. You website configuration should never be a hindrance to achieving the widest potential exposure.
6. Ignoring Mobile Design
The last design mistake is common among companies designing their first website. Just like designing a website is thought of as happening on a computer, many think that mobile browsing is only an alternative to the main desktop experience. It is definitely no longer the case. Mobile browsing actually accounts for a majority of traffic on the internet. Many designers actually create a mobile site prior to creating the desktop site.
Prioritizing mobile design is known as mobile-first strategy. It is currently a popular method even among large companies. It means designing your site for mobile devices initially and later expanding toward a desktop version. This method is gaining because the desktop-first design risks making the website too slow or cluttered when accessing it from a mobile device.
There are clear reasons to design your site having in mind mobile. Alexander Williams, a web developer at Hosting Data, based in London, states that your major goal in website design should be improving conversions. Since the majority of users will use smartphones, they require the ability of buying products conveniently from their phones.
This point can also extend to tablets and other smart devices, as well as other types of internet-capable hardware which is available today. The design of your website must be accessible on various devices, and responsive to automatically adjust and feel right on a wide variety of devices. As we’ve shown, achieving this may be difficult since it means considering wide-ranging factors, from page layout to image sizes.
If you’re having doubts, hiring a professional is wise. While the listed mistakes may seem simple to avoid, they are commonly made during the web design process. Even large businesses often get it wrong, so teaming up with a designer will give your brand a competitive edge.
