3 simple reasons you should care about website buttons

Of all things that inform small business website design, you might not think the buttons on your website are worth much attention. Most of us can probably barely imagine a website without a button, though, so it’s something that’s well worth thinking about.

Let’s face it, buttons haven’t gone out of fashion. They continue to be everywhere on websites, including on contact forms and in calls to action, so here are a few factors you need to consider with yours.

Size

Size does matter, but bigger isn’t always better with buttons. Instead, balance should be your watchword. Your site’s buttons shouldn’t be so large that they look ridiculous, nor should they be so small that your visitors are constantly missing the button when they try to click or tap it.

Remember that in a world of smartphones, tablets and ‘phablets’ and the responsive web designs built around such devices, it also needs to be easy for both desktop and mobile visitors to your website to interact with your buttons.

Focus

Sometimes, there is a need to use more than one button in one place — an obvious example being in a call to action (CTA) asking your site visitors to sign up for your email newsletter.

Of course, there needs to be a button the visitor can press to ‘register’ with you once they have entered their email address and an ‘ignore’ button must be present, too, particularly with GDPR around the corner.

Both buttons need to be easily visible, though it’s the ‘register’ button that should be more prominent. After all, that’s the button you will want your visitors to actually use.

Appearance

Remember that the whole point of a website button is that it should be something your site visitors will want to click on — and for that matter, they should know it is something they can click on.

This means your website buttons will need to be instantly recognisable as buttons.

However, that doesn’t mean there’s no scope for creativity with how your buttons look. Just consider such popular ‘types’ of buttons as…

• The glossy button: all the rage in the web’s early days and can still make an impact.
• The round button: usually easy to spot and recognise as a button (when we think of ‘nuclear’ or ‘launch’ buttons from movies or cartoons, they’re usually round).
• The flat button: very much in keeping with the trend towards simple, flat designs that we’ve seen across the web and beyond in recent years.
• The icon button: helps the user to immediately understand what the button does. If you see a phone icon on a website nowadays, for example, it probably lets you dial a number to speak with someone.
• The ghost button: similar to a flat button, except it doesn’t have any background. It simply resembles text surrounded by a border and it looks awesome on top of large background images.

As you can see, there’s quite a bit to think about in terms of website buttons. Thankfully, you don’t necessarily need to spend a huge amount of time thinking about it yourself.

Get in touch with the PENNInk Productions team today, and we’ll get straight on the case with the highest standard of small business website design… buttons and all.

Originally published at PENNInk Productions.