Websites have become much more than mere visiting cards for businesses. Now, even the businesses with next to no ecommerce purposes are utilizing their website to build an active digital presence. As a matter of fact, it has become so easy to create an ecommerce website – it almost feels like plug and play!
This has both good and bad news for website development services providers and businesses. On one side, their businesses have started growing tremendously, since everyone needs a website now. But, at the same time, their growth is also stagnating because it has become so difficult for websites to stand out from the crowd.
If you have to differentiate your website, you will have to go straight to the first principle levels. Sit down with your website design and development teams and get started with building a truly magnificent website.
There are two key areas where websites can differentiate themselves:
A. One the basis of aesthetics B. On the basis of features
Based on these two principles, these are the five features you should have in your website:
1. Conversational Chatbots
Gone are the times when chatbots were only meant to be information disseminators. You would choose a question from the drop-down menu and the chatbot would find a solution for you – that was all there was available in the name of conversation.
With the advent of Natural language processing, the bar has increased significantly. The chatbots today cannot just lead to the most relevant link – they have to build a conversation with you. So if you plan to execute this idea, your web development services partner should have the ML and NLP resources.
2. Responsive website
One of the simples and yet most sophisticated developments in website UX has been the implementation of responsive websites. Responsive websites design and development is by no means an easy feat. Yet, it shows that you are ready to adapt with the visitor.
Not long ago, it was common for people to pinch in or zoom out, when trying to visit a website on their phones. Now, people juts intuitively expect the website to adapt with their screen’s size – whether it is a smartphone or a laptop or a desktop or even a tablet.
3. Expedited Loading:
One of the biggest leaps of faith in website design, has been the awareness businesses have got around the loading time of websites and landing pages. With more and more content available to the users, they don’t seem to be sitting on any website for a prolonged period of time. So, unless you are streaming websites pushing out limited edition content – there is no way a slow loading page will be tolerated by a user.
This can be theoretically proven, by looking at the average attention span of a user and the average loading time of web pages – both have been going down significantly, for years now. Hence, you have to ensure that your website remains lite and easy to load. Here are a few steps you can take up to ensure expedited loading:
a. Using Content Delivery Networks for static content. b. Bring down your HTTP requests. c. Use caching. d. Be smart about using compression for images.
4. Minimalism:
If you sit and talk to your web design services partner about minimalism – you will get to see how far the web development community has come in the last few decades. Minimalism is the art of communicating the essential with the least possible message elements. Integrating this design philosophy into your website would be integral, not just to the website, but your business as well.
When you apply minimalist designs to your website, you cannot have all the features popping up at once. You have to carefully examine which are the ones most useful for the user and start with showing those. So, minimalism is as much about web analytics as it is about design itself.
5. Dynamic Content:
Finally, if you have been using browser cache and cookies, and have user accounts on your website – you might have to ensure that the users’ home pages are dynamic.
The idea was popularized by Netflix, who used machine learning to create dynamic pages for users on the basis of their interests and their past visits. You can implement a similar solution to your website with the apt website development services in California.