How do you know if you’re making the right choices for your website design? Calgary business owners should take advantage of every tool and technique available to help visitors find what they’re searching for and keep them coming back for more.
Accordions are a design element that makes it possible to collapse sections of content. They give your users control over what they read and reduce the need to scroll through information they don’t care about or want to know. But it’s up to you and your design team to use them most effectively.
When Users Don’t Need the Whole Story
Giving visitors freedom and control is essential. Accordions allow you to hide some of the text on a page, so visitors to your site can still get the information they want without being overwhelmed with text. By incorporating this design choice, you will show your visitors that you value their time and judgment by letting them focus on what they decide matters most.
Accordions are also an effective alternative to links (either within pages or to other pages) because they don’t break your reader’s concentration and they don’t have to wait for additional text to load.
Mobile browsing is also easier when you use accordions. People will often quit scrolling through large blocks of information on smaller screens. Collapsing information with accordions gives your readers an overview of the information on the page and simplifies navigation.
When They Need to Know it All
Consider the use case for your page. Do your users need to know everything on the page to answer their questions? Smart website design in Calgary won’t make them work harder by hiding information. Relevance always comes before page length.
Readers often don’t mind clicking on links if the content is useful to them, but if a click is only to reveal something that perhaps could have been there to start, they’re liable to stop clicking and reading altogether.
Concealing content with an accordion also complicates printing. If users are likely to want to print the page, don’t frustrate them by using accordions, which will make it hard for them to print your text all in one piece. Even if you’re not using accordions, you should always optimize pages for printing.
Best Practices
Always put your users first. The best place to begin when deciding on accordion use is to think about how most people will use the page. Your website design in Calgary, can be your most powerful marketing tool if you let it. Let these practices be a guide when using (or considering) accordions:
- Keep your content within accordions as short as possible. No one wants to scroll unnecessarily. If you have a lot of content and feel like you can’t condense it, maybe you need another page dedicated specifically to that topic.
- Don’t overuse accordions. Limit yourself to five or six on a page. Again, if you have that much to say, you’re trying to put too much information on a page. Too many accordions show a lack of focus and can confuse users or make them stop reading.
- Too many accordions can also hurt your SEO because search engines won’t be able to determine what is important.
- If you only need one accordion on a page, don’t use it. Put that information in a paragraph.
- Accordions give users choice. You shouldn’t assume every visitor to a page will open all of them. Never hide important information like major calls to action with an accordion.
Accordions can be an excellent solution for shortening long pages filled with valuable content, but like any design choice, you need to know when and how to use them to maximize their effectiveness. If you’re not sure whether accordions are right for your website design, consult the experts at Emphasize Design in Calgary. Whether you’re looking for web design, content development, PPC, SEO, or social media marketing, we offer the services your company needs. Let us be your team for a complete online marketing package, and we’ll create a beautiful web design for your business for free!
