Todd Sumamno
If you work in the field of web design – which we imagine applies to many of the people who visit our website – the amount of money that online casino websites make probably annoys you. If it doesn’t annoy you already, it’s probably going to start doing so as soon as we give you a figure. According to the most recent information available, they were making more than fifty billion dollars a year by the end of 2018. Current projections suggest that the figure will be touching $100bn by the end of 2024. That’s a lot of money – but why do we think it annoys web designers?
To answer that question, we first need you to take a look at a successful online casino website. That shouldn’t be difficult – there are hundreds of popular Jumpman casino on the internet, and providing you live in a country where accessing them is legal, you shouldn’t have a problem finding one. Pick an online slots website and study it closely. Look at what’s there. Look at what isn’t there. Make a visual assessment of that online slots website, and consider the things you like and don’t like about it. When you’re done, come back here.
We’re going to predict what you thought about the website, and it doesn’t matter which one you looked at. We think that you thought it was too basic, too brief, and possibly even ugly. You likely felt that it looked like something from ten years ago. You wondered where the video content was, and why there were no high-resolution images. If you’ve been working in web design for a while, you probably also spent a few moments thinking about how you could do it better. This is where you’re going wrong. This is why you need to think about what we’re going to call “casino style” in web design.
You’re free to use whatever style you wish for your own web pages. One of the joys of being a web designer is that you get the chance to express your creativity and shape the internet to look as you want it to look, and nobody can or should stop you from doing that. If you do web design for a living, though, and you’re being paid by people to build them a website, you need to consider the principles of casino design more closely. In almost every case, the person who’s paying you to design or re-design their website will be using their website to sell products or services. That means your job is to deliver them a website that’s optimally arranged to make it as easy for people to buy those products and services as possible.
As web designers, we all-too-often lose sight of that aim. We get hung up on how something looks, and how modern the features look. We set off in pursuit of beauty. We look to create a website that gets the ‘wow’ factor from people who log onto is, and we sometimes forget that we’ve buried whatever it is that our client is trying to sell behind a wall of sleek promotional videos, high-resolution images, and sleek menu pages. Aesthetically you’ll have done a wonderful job – and the client is likely to be very happy with it at first – but in the long term, you’re doing them a disservice. You’re making it too hard for the customer to get where they want to go.
Minimalism has never been more fashionable than it is right now. We’re living in the era of Marie Kondo being a star, and there are people throwing our priceless family heirlooms because they don’t ‘spark joy.’ There’s more to minimalism than just living in de-cluttered houses, though – we should also be looking to live with de-cluttered websites. That’s what “casino style” is all about. The people who designed the pages of the online slots website didn’t leave out all of those extra elements because they weren’t capable of putting them in there or programming them. They left them out because they would get in the way if they’d left them there.
What casino and online slot websites excel at is getting the customer in front of their desired product as quickly as possible. Nobody ever arrives on a website without knowing why they’re there or what they’re looking for. They’ll note the attractiveness of your design, but really they just want to find what they want as quickly as possible. This is why the slots page you looked at had a collection of slots on the very first page you looked at. It’s also why the registration and login page doesn’t take visitors away from that page. There’s no reason that you need to leave the page to complete the process, and so you don’t. You do it with your end goal in view the whole time, and so your mind doesn’t waver. Your desire to purchase the product – in this case, an online slots game – doesn’t diminish.
An online slots page doesn’t have multiple side-pages because it doesn’t need to. It doesn’t have a landing splash page because it’s a barrier between where the customer is, and where both the customer and the company that owns the website wants the customer to be. It doesn’t have high-resolution images or video content because that would make the page take longer to load, and that’s time that the customer could use to go through the registration process or choose which online slots game they want to play. It’s fast. It’s simple. It’s web design cut down to its basic essentials, and it works perfectly. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a template model of an industry that will soon be taking in one hundred billion dollars a year.
Next time someone employs you to build a website for them, ask yourself one question when you’re doing with your initial design. It might be pretty. It might be stylish. But is it “casino style?” If it isn’t then as difficult as it might be, it’s time to rip it all down and start away. Good-looking websites attract lingering stares, but “casino style” websites attract money. We know which one we would want if we were your client.
Brittany Maslo