When visitors arrive at your website, you’ve got about 15 seconds to capture their attention before they decide to move on.
15 second: not an awful lot of time.
In that time, they’ve got to be able to extract the information that they want, click on menus, navigate to different pages and buy stuff. To get them to do that, you need to have a beautifully and intuitively designed website. Here’s what you need to do.
Put A Professional Logo On Your Header, And Link It To Your Homepage
According to Tiffany Monhollon, an online content creation expert, logos are an important part of your company’s branding. As such, logos should be displayed prominently, at the top of the website on every page. She recommends that businesses use high-resolution images and feature their logo in the top left corner of every page on their site. She also says that it’s a good rule of thumb to use your logo as a link back to your homepage so that guests can very easily navigate your website.
Make Navigation Intuitive
Brian Gatti, a partner at a business foundation, says that the top websites always use primary navigation options on a horizontal menu bar that runs across the top of the site.
He also recommends that businesses use a secondary navigation option in the form of a left-hand sidebar which gives additional navigation options.
Brian Garrity says that intuitive navigation is important because confusing layouts can result in people quitting your sides rather than taking the time to figure it out. Instead of putting links to less important pages – ones that take people away from your calls to action on your landing pages or at the top of your homepage – he recommends they are put in the footer of your website. At the foot of your website, you can include links to your “about” section, promotional programs, terms and conditions, and frequently asked questions page.
Test Out Your Design
Lindsay Marshall, a producer, and director, says that it is important to test every aspect of your website design. She says that businesses should trial different placements for their calls to action and even go as far as to test out different colors. She said that doing this type of a/b testing is good for optimizing your website and improving your bottom line.
Marshall says that this type of approach has really helped giants in industry, like Microsoft. She remembers a time when a manager at the Bing search engine was able to generate 80 million dollars in extra revenue simply by implementing and testing a new shade of blue. It turned out that customers really liked a particular shade of blue and clicking on it.
It is important to remember that every design decision that you make is, in fact, a hypothesis. Simply testing and then conducting some analytics on your site can help you constantly make improvements to your design and get feedback from the people who use it.
Pay Attent To Your Buttons
Often, the ugliest part of a website is the submit or send button, right down at the bottom. For this reason, it is important that designers of websites make submission buttons as attractive as possible. They should be so beautiful that when visitors see them, they cannot help but click on them.
It is also recommended by many design experts that you make sure that the color of your call to action buttons changes when users hover over them. A simple change in color can lead to substantial increases in conversion. It’s also a good idea to change things like the gradient, opacity, or fonts when users interact with your buttons. Some companies are now going as far as to make their buttons animated in some way, such as dancing from side to side, vibrating, or becoming larger when hovered over by the user’s cursor.
Get Rid Of Flash
Over the last few years, there has been a dispute between Apple and Adobe about Flash being the standard on the Internet. Because of this conflict, many agencies have looked elsewhere for different Internet standards that provide a better quality of service. According to Darrell Benatar, the CEO of a testing company, HTML5 is the new standard in town and is gaining tremendous support across the web because of its search engine friendly text and the fact that it is easy to integrate into mobile operating systems. Flash, on the other hand, cannot easily be incorporated and doesn’t provide the same design quality as HTML5. HTML5 is more beautiful, faster loading and more flexible than Adobe Flash.
Use Responsive Design
Jamie Pressly is a marketing director for a jewelry company. He says that the best-designed websites are those that automatically adapt to how a site is being used, whether that is on mobile, PC or tablets. He says that companies shouldn’t develop a website for every device that could possibly use it. Instead, they should invest in a responsive design that adapts to the size of the browser window making for a better experience. Jamie says that when users have a better experience on your sites, they are more likely to stay longer which is important for SEO, as detailed by Poet Media.
Put Calls To Action At The Top
Many businesses think that calls to action should come at the end of all of their marketing material. But evidence from numerous tests suggests otherwise. According to the top experts from cio.com businesses should put their calls to action in the top third of their websites, alongside any personal contact information. For instance, it is now becoming standard to put the business’s phone number and email address on the top right-hand side of the website in the header.
Some experts recommend against using full-width sliders. Instead, they suggest using images that cover around two-thirds of the width of the page. This will allow contact forms to be above the fold.
Every Page Should Be A Landing Page
What is the purpose of a landing page? The purpose of a landing page is to make it as easy as possible for somebody visiting your site to understand the products and services that you offer, the particular products that apply to them, and how they can buy them. In effect, landing pages should be stand-alone pages that communicate all necessary information to visitors of your sites.
But according to Michael Freeman, an Analytics expert, every page on your website should be organized in a similar way. He points out that most websites assume that visitors arrived through the home page and then navigate to various products from there. But in reality, thanks to Google changes in its algorithm, most people arrive on business websites at specific pages. Freeman says that this means that sites must be designed in such a way that no matter what page a person lands on, all the information they need is available.
Choose Easy-To-Read Fonts
There has been a trend recently towards fonts that are thinner and more gray. As a result, it is becoming more and more difficult for many users to read what is on the screen. This is why experts recommend that businesses use font sizes that are no smaller than 11 PT.
It is also worth considering which type of fonts look best on which devices. Some large fonts will look great on PC monitors, but when scaled down to mobile and tablet devices, may not look as good.
If your web page has a fixed width, it’s a good idea to choose a font size that allows no more than 15 to 20 words per line. Lines that are longer than this can be off-putting and ugly for website visitors. Fluid design websites are built around linewidth of 15 to 20 words or around 1000 pixels.
Use Incredible Photography
Zayn Schwarzlose is a community relations director for a marketing company. He says that website visitors are very good at sniffing out generic photos. Because your business is not generic, it is important, he says, that every business provides original photography that describes them accurately. For businesses who can afford it, Schwarzlose recommends they hire a photographer who can produce professional photographs that draws the eye and help generate an emotional connection with the visitor. All of the photos on your website, he says, should have something to do with your message and provide customers with a reason to buy from you.
An excellent way to draw in new conversions, he said, is to use photographs of people’s faces. Faces help to draw the eye and bring people into your business making it more likely that they will click on your calls to action.
Be Clever With Color
According to experts, using a neutral color palette is the best way to make your site appears elegant and modern. It is important to have bright colors, but these colors need to be tempered by relatively plain backgrounds. The best websites use bright colors on their action and contrast them against neutral colors in the background.