There are now literally billions of pages on the web. Some are more functional than others. Some are more relevant. Some even look a lot prettier than anything else online. But to that last point, how much eye candy does a website really need? Ask five web developers and you might get five different answers.
Companies that provide web development services take a different approach to the eye candy issue. On the one hand, too much eye candy can make a website slow. It can make it look and feel cluttered. On the other hand, a website that looks too basic and no frills might be a turn-off to a modern audience that expects more.
User Experience Is What Matters
Webtek Digital Marketing is a Salt Lake City SEO and digital marketing firm with clients nationwide. They have been at this for many years. Their experts say that when it comes to how the eye candy question, a more important consideration is user experience. User experience is what matters in the end.
It is absolutely important to pay attention to things like technical SEO, content marketing, keyword research, and so forth. But all those other things matter little at the point where visitor meets web page. At that point, how a visitor feels about their experience largely determines what happens as a result of that experience.
For example, a website that is difficult to navigate is one that struggles to hold visitors. People do not usually stick around if it takes too much work to find what they are looking for. Similarly, a website that is difficult to read because of the chosen font and color scheme will not retain visitors. So web development pros must be just as diligent with aesthetic appeal as they are a website’s technical aspects.
Eye Candy Elicits Different Reactions
The other thing about website eye candy is that it elicits different reactions from website visitors. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? What one person finds excessive another might feel is just right. What one visitor considers ugly might look gorgeous to someone else. It is all too subjective to make black-and-white judgments.
All of this leads to an obvious question: if there are no black-and-white standards, how is a web developer to know whether the eye candy is too much? It is really an artistic sort of thing. Despite the highly technical nature of web development services, there is a certain amount of creativity and artistic license involved.
For that very reason, web development service providers tend to bring in at least a few team members with an artistic bent. Creatives with a natural talent for things like graphic arts and color schemes also have an innate ability to look at a website and determine if its eye candy is too much or too little. It is more a matter of interpretation than science.
That is What Testing Is For
Figuring out how much eye candy to put on a website starts with creativity, but it ends with testing. A smart web development service provider will put a website through A/B testing before ever launching. A/B testing puts a new design through its paces by way of real human testers capable of offering valuable feedback.
How much eye candy does a website really need? That is open to interpretation. Perhaps a better way to look at it is to figure out how to make the user experience as positive as possible and then focus on that. A positive user experience is what ultimately gets results.
