06 Jan The Basics of Building a Better Web Experience

As the famous Chinese proverb goes, “the journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet,” so too does the online customer experience. The journey that the client takes when they visit a company’s website starts and ends with the look and feel of web design. More often than not, it comes down to two basic creative elements, content and text/image spacing.

The reader experience has always started with the paragraph, since the beginning of print. Throughout the history of typography, the concept of the well designed paragraph using the standard pilcrow symbol (¶) was meant to signify a change in speak, thought or idea ­— explored further in an in-depth article by Jason Pamental on printmag.com. We still use this form of writing today on the web albeit in a simpler, more digestible format.

In the article, Pamental notes that just by designing one great paragraph, down to every fine detail and nuance, one can then create great website layouts “from the content out.” As the typography builds out, it creates a “robust foundation for the entirety of the web content and the site beyond.” He also notes that the driving notion that has propelled web design forward is that “good design starts with clean, flexible content.”

Graphic designer and resident web expert at Idea Associates, Tyler Smith, agrees that since most audiences today have short attention spans, all content created for a landing page must be able to be “taken at a glance” and adds that, “text should be presented in small, easily digestible pieces.”

“When creating a unique web experience for our clients, we tend to highlight important names or phrases throughout the text so that the reader, or potential customer, has multiple points of entry into the topic, often making the opening letter or word of a new thought stand out to further delineate a new beginning,” he states.

Taylor McKenzie, account executive, adds her thoughts on the paragraph and overall spacing as it is applied to the customer web experience stating that, “It doesn’t matter how much information you can pack into a website, if it’s not well laid out and intuitive, or if the reader has to work to decipher the information presented, then you’ve already lost your audience.”

“Proper spacing of text, as well as images, on a website that keeps a streamlined look and feel is crucial to the overall usability of the site, five lines should be the maximum length of a paragraph on any website — as we move into 2016, our team has taken these points into consideration as we work on transforming our own site,” she adds.

Just as the leading web experts of today would probably agree, in the age of responsive web design when our content needs to work well across nearly limitless numbers of screen sizes, resolutions and technologies, content and appropriate spacing set the foundation for a productive customer experience.

To learn more about how you can create a unique experience for your audience, feel free to drop us a line using the contact form here.