White Space Is the New Flashy

White space is all the rave.

Do you remember when websites were boring text in a simple font with hardly any images?  Boring.  As technology sped ahead, soon you were showing off how tech savvy you were by not only incorporating font variations and pictures, but also including videos, music, moving text, and more.  Wow!  Now that we’ve all seen what technology can do, there has been a return to the simplistic.  Clean, crisp, easy-to-use websites are in – white space is your friend.

Unless your customers can buy your product from start to finish on your website, the overall feel of it should be “less is more.”  You may be tempted to include every piece of information you could possibly provide about your product or service or, worse yet, every little side product or service you offer as well.  While you don’t want to leave important questions unanswered, overloading your website with information can turn customers away as well.

Have you ever been searching for a company, perhaps to provide your cable service, and your experience was something like this?  You type “cable service” into your search engine.  As you scan the results, you click on a company that interests you.  As soon as the page opens, a loud video starts blaring the company’s latest commercial.  Since you’re at your desk at work, surfing the web during your lunch break, you frantically search for the pause button or volume control  so your neighboring co-workers will stop staring at you.  Once you’ve averted that disaster, you begin searching the site.  All you want is to know how much cable service is in your area and what channels are included.  But can you find that?  No.  You’re overloaded with page after page of other services, phone, internet, home security (what?!  the cable company offers home security?)…and all the ways you can save money by bundling all of these services together, not to mention the ads that are popping up and the various unsuspected videos that keep sneaking up on you on as you navigate to different pages.  (Thank goodness you muted your computer.)  Perhaps you remember this experience ending with you leaving the site and choosing another provider, one who made it easy for you to find the simple information you wanted.

Customers often know exactly what they’re looking for when they come to your website – make it simple to find.  Help them get the answers to their major questions, so they can determine if they’re interested in contacting you for further details.  And then make it easy for them to contact you.  Don’t cram your website full of unnecessary information; make use of white space.  Doing so doesn’t mean your website has to be boring.  It doesn’t even mean it has to be “white.”  Just remember to make your website for your customers rather than for you.  What do they want to find there?  And leave the rest blank.

For a website with the right white space for you, please contact us.