Web Design for Health and Fitness Organizations

Best Practices for Health & Fitness Web Design

Clean, Effective Design

Understanding how valuable the information on health-oriented websites is, special consideration should be taken to ensure that the design is clean and uncluttered. Allowing for more breathing room and breaks in the presentation of information allows users to absorb the vast amounts of information they’re seeking from the website.

Controlled Colour Palette

Keeping the colour palette in check is essential. This is not to say we should create health and fitness websites devoid of colour and excitement or rely on the traditional blue and white. The idea is to keep the colour palette under control by limiting the use of a wide range of colours and maintaining a healthy level of contrast between colour, image and content.

Typography

Typography plays a crucial role in the success of the website design in several ways. Using a modern, easy-to-read typeface allows the audience to scan and find what they’re looking for quickly, reducing the strain on their eyes as they read larger blocks of content. Using a slightly larger point size and increased line height allows the reader’s eyes to relax a little more than usual and will keep visitors on the website longer.

Navigation

Efficient and intuitive navigation design is a must for any website, in our opinion; however, in the case of health and fitness websites, we strive to take this one step further. In addition to an intuitive navigational experience, we try to boil navigation down and group related information more than a typical website. This helps users easily navigate their topic of interest and allows for great on-site cross-linking opportunities to boost the website’s search engine performance.

Photography

Photography plays a major role in health and fitness-focused website designs. As health-related information can often be stress-inducing or carry with it a powerful emotional response, selecting calming or more positive imagery can help balance the experience on the website for the audience and ultimately leave a more positive, lasting impression between the brand and viewer.

Responsive and Accessible

It’s become increasingly rare to stumble across a website that is not yet responsive to your mobile device; however, the health and fitness field may be the slowest to adapt next to the financial industry. There’s no clear reason why this is the case. It could be tighter budgets or simply the fact that these websites tend to be rather daunting and information-heavy for their owners. The time commitment required for the organization to invest in a website redesign can be quite extensive.

Our approach to website design for health and fitness organizations boils down to a pretty simple rule:

The website should be accessible anytime, anywhere.

Compliance

Lastly, the most commonly overlooked aspect of website design for health and fitness organizations is compliance. This topic is creeping up more in contemporary website design and will soon be the standard practice, we hope. Ensuring the website meets accessibility compliance standards ensures that anyone and everyone can use the website to gather and understand important information. This appeals to a larger audience and can also offer significant search engine optimization benefits.

About Parachute Design

If you’re interested in learning more about how we employ these best practices for health and fitness organizations or to have us prepare a formal proposal for your business, please complete our online quote request form or call our health and fitness website design experts in Toronto at 416-901-8633.