Having a good site design and content that people enjoy is important. Even more important are the subtleties of your site. A handful of minor details that can add up to make a big impact…in your favor or against it.

Subtleties are how software designers create such great interfaces and products, they’re how famous designers make purses people will pay insane prices for, and they’re probably the reasons behind why you hate or love your car. There are many details to be aware of, but here are a few simple ones that can help you give a pleasant and appealing experience to your users.

Make Your Text Stand Up

Text is what you communicate to the user through. This is why it’s important to have clear and concise text that makes sense to the user within the current context. Let’s look at an example:

Looking at Cork’d, we can see that the text existing on their site (the Good side) is very to the point and attractive, making the user want to join the community. The text on the right side (the Bad side), while clear and concise, lacks any lipstick to make the user want to initiate action.

The text on the right is, unfortunately, text that we see in many cases. This shows how easy it is to tweak your existing text to create a little bit more draw. The basic rule is to give the user a little more than the facts, but not a short-story. This is part of your site’s marketing, don’t assume your developers know how to write properly.

Mold Your Forms

Forms stand between users interacting with your site. Whether it’s a search box or a login form, you want to give users a clear and direct path to the end. Many eye-tracking studies have shown how best to construct forms and while the details seem minor, you can improve the overall effectiveness of your forms with a couple of simple rules. Let’s look at a short form:

The FeedBurner example above shows how the eye moves when interacting with the login form. As you can see, the form on the left (the Bad side) creates a darting back and forth to understand the form, as well as a final stretch to find the submit button. This is just plain bad, and sadly, is the existing form.

You can see the form on the right (the Good side) alleviates the darting issues and gives the user’s eye a direct line down the form. This is proven to increase the speed at which they will complete the form and the efficiency of how they interact with the form.

This example should give you an edge when touching your shorter forms. Remember though that while this method is great for short forms, it does not necessarily fit longer forms or forms that require the user to think about their answer.

The Grid! The Grid!

Many people have been talking about this topic lately. Keeping your site design on a grid is essential to how you organize your information and how easily your user is able to consume what you’re serving up to them.

A benefit to using a grid is the breathing room that it gives to your site. By using a grid setup, you are able to keep equal margins and padding between areas of content. This ensures a balanced feel to your site, as well as makes it very digestible for your users.

Don’t think of it as an equal grid. Allow your content to span multiple columns, but always adhere to the margins and padding you’ve set. This will make a big difference to your site if it is not presently set up on a grid of some sort.

For more information on grids, go here and here!

Up Keep and Keep Up

Sites are like children. When the site goes live, you’ve just given birth to a child. For it to succeed you must nurture it, interact with it, and spend time furthering it.

I’ve been involved with corporations launching social sites and then leaving them, hoping that people will “catch on.” When they don’t, it’s then assumed that the site just needs more marketing.

This is incorrect.

For a successful site, you must keep up with it, see how people are using it. Interact with the users on the site and create a relationship. You wouldn’t expect to hold a boyfriend or girlfriend by ignoring them, would you? Websites are the same way.

How Do You Detail…

These tips can help you catch some additional users and make their browsing experiences better. There are many more things you can do to improve and keep improving your sites though.

What are some tips you’ve added to your website arsenal?