BrittanyLike any creative pursuit, building a website can fill our minds with possibilities for exciting concepts that we can’t wait to explore. Also like any creative pursuit, however, the best building practices can involve what you leave out as much as what you put in. This aspect of website creation can be key for many reasons, and it’s an element every designer needs to take seriously if they want their result to be as successful as possible.
Looking at website design consistency, we want to explore why this component is so central to deciding what to include and exclude when developing your online ideas. Why does it matter, what common mistakes do designers make, and how do you ensure a balance that still maintains enough variety to keep users interested?
Why Bother with Consistency?
Consistency matters because it helps keep users on track and focused on what they’re doing. It might seem like this is an ability that all humans naturally possess, but, in the modern age, it’s not so simple. While it’s not intentional, attention span getting shorter in recent years is a real issue. Considerable thanks here go to social media and the scrolling we’ve become accustomed to on services like Instagram and TikTok. The instant gratification these platforms grant us essentially rewires our brains to look for constant new stimulation, causing serious degradation in attention capabilities.
The implications of degrading attention span are profound in many aspects of life, and this includes what we need to focus on in website development. While some impatient part of many users might be looking to jump ship, consistent design elements help them to stay on course. This increases clickthrough rates and increases the likelihood that you’ll successfully convey the information you want, make a sale, or otherwise accomplish whatever your goal may be.
Elements of Consistency
Maintaining consistent design can be quite simple, starting with an anchor point. Consider how the best online pokies sites work, and how they combine their many elements with design consistency. Each of these services offers different bonus features like deposit matches and free spins, and each offers a huge range of games on desktop and mobile systems. This broad variety necessitates clear and consistent design, and this is exactly what each service features whether players are jumping into slots, table games, or just browsing.
Consistent design starts with the anchor point of the overall theme. This means the general website decoration, logo, and key features. Each of these needs to be shared across pages, and, just as importantly, they need to be shared across different devices. Whether users access the site via smartphone, tablet, desktop, or laptop, websites need to be identifiable at a glance, and this identity must ring true wherever it might be encountered. You can see this practice at work in the demonstrations on our website showcase.
Finding the Balancing Point
These concerns might seem simple enough as a starting point, but we also need to look at challenges one often encounters in the pursuit of brand consistency. One common issue is that an overreliance on consistency can result in a bland design that does nothing to pique user engagement. If everything is too uniform, then users can quickly grow tired of the experience.
A challenge like this has solutions, but each solution will depend heavily on your specific website, its target audience, and what you’re trying to accomplish. You do want to insert some flair, and you do want to make each section stand out, but you also need to find the balancing point where distinctive design won’t distract too much from the core personality of your website.
A good starting point that most websites can embrace is retaining your logo’s key attributes as much as possible across different services and iterations. More crucially, keep the layout and functionality of each page similar across your website, within reason. After all, nobody wants to jump between sections and have to relearn the intricacies of how they function each time.
From here, you can work on modifying color schemes and implementing extra graphical elements that don’t interfere with the website’s regular image and operation. Some services like Squarespace offer simple ways to transform a website for the holidays, for example, while more custom-built websites might require a more hands-on approach. There are nearly infinite options here, but as long as they don’t confuse or distract your users from what they are doing, then you’ve probably found a good jumping-off point.
Consistency in website design is an important part of the creative process, but it needs to be tempered with a little bit of that personal touch. Finding where the line between personality and universality lies for you might require some experimentation, but it’s worth it to land an interface that can really aid in expressing the best of what a website has to offer. Take your time, remember what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll be better prepared and more confident in your designs going forward.
