The Importance of Web Design for Financial Businesses

 

A company is noticed by its website. So, the design process of the website, along with the means to find it, will be most important. Also, consideration will need to be given to how fit for purpose the website is for when it comes to its intended purpose. It should always be geared to the type of business it is intended to promote.

Financial web design, for example, is all about displaying figures to their best in terms of clarity and explanation.

So, let us look at ways to make sure that our website design attracts the right kind of attention when it is intended for the financial world.

What is a Finance Website?

The first part of designing an effective financial website is to know what it should include. For example, its purpose will be to provide or display a wide range of financial data all in one place. The layout of the figures will be extremely important when it comes to understanding them and putting them into context.

A finance website will be something of a financial hub for users or clients, as they are termed in the financial sector. These users will likely include individual investors who will want to look up the latest financial news and data in making their investment decisions. So, now we realise that our website needs to contain words as well as numbers and blend the two in all the right places for complete understanding.

Best Ways to Display Numerical Data

Numerical data makes more sense to more people displayed in diagrammatic form. If not in tables laying it out in rows and columns then in graphs of one kind or another. There are many types of graphs or charts to choose from. Some will be more suited to certain types of data than others. It is for the web designer, in collaboration with the financial provider of the website, to assess which ones suit the data.

So, the types of graphs or charts include:

Area Chart

Bar Chart/Graph

Bubble Chart

Dot Graph or Plot

Histogram Chart

Line Graph or Chart

Pictogram Graph

Pie Chart

Radar Chart

Scatter Plot

Spline Chart

 

These are all graphical representations of financial data a good web designer will know about. You can, as the customer, have a lot of say in how you prefer your data displayed. It can be a matter of consistency and company branding that makes the overall decision.

It is useful to use different colours to separate lines or columns of data. Particularly where there are different sets of figures to compare. Even a bar graph that is one set of data would look nicer with different colours. It is just more striking to look at and makes a website more attractive. This has to be balanced, though, with the use for each colour. It is possible to overcomplicate an image when too many colours are used. Also, we have to bear in mind colour blindness and colours that clash so that we avoid the colours that should never be sensibly used in combination.

News Stories

A good idea where a financial website will have news stories is to have separate tabs for these so that they fall on separate pages to the figures. Then, users will know just where to look for the latest news. It is then important that these pages are capable of being updated frequently with the aim that the most recent or relevant stories appear at the top. So, there we have an immediate conflict. Which story should be top – the one that has just been released by media or the one that is most relevant to investors, but not too old? Well, perhaps this warrants another tab so that the ones that are highly relevant can be filtered out into a different section of the website that users will visit. 

In conclusion, we should think about how a financial website should look, know the types of graphs or charts that display financial data in a more pictorial form for understandability, and be aware from a technical and marketing point of view how to effectively present more wordy financial data. It would seem the best option to separate the two where news stories are involved.

When a professional website designer is employed, the above queries will all be easy to resolve, as they work with you to produce the best financial website possible to promote your financial business and its services.