Build a Better Website: How to Balance Performance and Appeal

September 4, 2020

You want a gorgeous site that tells your brand story like nothing else. With stunning interactive galleries, slick navigation, and powerful CTAs out in front, users can get to know your company and products – and click further through your sales cycle with ease. Loading your homepage with all of that, though, can cause issues. Done wrong, your site slows way down and user experience drops with it. But, with the right balance of website performance and appeal, you can have your cake and eat it too. These are the decisions we made for our client Patrick Malloy Communities – look closely, their old site may appear similar to the new one at first but there are some powerful, subtle changes we’ve made to help it perform its best.

Their Old Site

Patrick Malloy Communities’ old website

Balancing Navigation and Design

Navigation is a huge consideration with a significant impact on the design of your site. Clean top navigation has both appeal and speed – but hiding too much without using dropdowns makes it difficult to use the site. We implemented some simple dropdowns and supplemented them with a central page for all of Patrick Malloy’s communities. Further, we pulled the calls to action up and made them obvious on the front page. They’re not huge buttons – most of them are small, but effective, look closely and you can see little CTA buttons peppered everywhere. If someone lands here looking for a community to move to, they won’t miss a thing!

Load Speed Vs. Functionality

On Patrick Malloy’s site we wanted to include galleries in each community. Galleries are a perfect example of page load speed vs. functionality. Does your gallery auto-play a slideshow? Are all of your photos laid out on the page or are they behind a “see more” button? For this site we opted to show a few photos and put the rest behind a button – so they could all be loaded for truly curious users but they wouldn’t wreck page load times.

An important aside here: video is a truly fantastic element for your site, but it has to be compressed correctly, placed in the right container, and coded just right to keep from ruining your load speeds. It’s a complicated process – the team at Rearview are experts who can get beautiful video content on your site the right way, give us a call to talk about it.

Their New Site

Patrick Malloy Communities’ new website

Boosting Speed Behind the Scenes

Much of what makes a site fast can’t be seen. Data structure is a hidden aspect of your site that has a huge impact on speed. Luckily, this can have less of an effect on design – but it’s important to remember that the more complex you want your design to be, the slower it’s likely to be because of what has to go on in the back end. We completely redesigned the Patrick Malloy site, using data structure techniques to build it speedy from the ground up. Everything across their site, from the map on their community page to the little animations on the homepage above, are supported by intelligent, low-impact code to balance their design desires with the ideal site speed.

Learn More with Rearview Advertising

You could have a successful site redesign like Patrick Malloy Communities. A team of designers, developers, and content experts are waiting to help make your site smart, speedy, and gorgeous. Call Rearview Advertising today, or reach out on our contact page and get our weekly newsletter! Taking your marketing to the next level is easy, when you’ve got a dedicated team to get you there.