Your website is the most powerful marketing tool at your disposal, so it’s important to employ these proven techniques for customer conversion. In this field we constantly talk to businesses about the best web site design techniques that will help their business perform better. In case you stumbled upon this page from the search engines, we are Bapple, a professional web design agency in Sydney and we hope to help you on your website building journey.
Design affects your visitors willingness to stay on your site
Design is like a personality for a brand, it’s the soul and vibe of your business, it’s what contributes to how a piece of communication makes your visitor feel. It’s also how you say what you’re saying; how do you wish people to take your information in? Thick, fast and efficient or slow, relaxed and mindful. Design and writing are two of your most powerful tools for connecting with people and keeping them captivated.
Identify a purpose
Every website should be built around a clear cut purpose that caters to the needs of its users. Are visitors in search of information, entertainment, transactions or another purpose? Furthermore, every page should have a clear purpose that meets some kind of customer need.
Use call to action buttons – CTA’s
With your identified purpose, make sure you include obvious coloured buttons that tell the user what to do eg. GET A FREE QUOTE, READ MORE, BUY NOW, CALL NOW etc. You’ll be amazed at how effective these are. People want to be guided through a site, it shouldn’t be hard work. Be absolutely certain that your site employs a logical page hierarchy, ‘bread crumb’ leads, clickable buttons and of course, the ‘three click rule’ that states users should be able to track down desired information in a trio of steps.
Be mobile friendly
Mobile browsing is now bigger than ever. People on the go are constantly browsing sites whilst on buses, trains and standing in queues. Sites that fail to offer responsive web design will inevitably lose browsers. Keep the layout simple and again, employ the use of CTA’s.
Smaller chunks of text and narrative structure
Online customers have notoriously short attention spans which means it’s critical to capture their attention, and retain it. Do this by making information easy to find, read and digest.
This includes breaking up content into smaller but easy to read paragraphs, image dividers, narrative stories and or bullet points.
Avoid using giant walls of text to describe your services or products, you’ll send your users to sleep. If users are overwhelmed by a page, they will leave. When building a page, ask yourself – is all of this information necessary?
Readable typefaces
Reading online content should be easy on the eyes. While there are no stone set rules, Sans Serif fonts are generally preferred by web designers, with optimal size identified as 16px.
Captivating visuals
Humans are predominantly visual beings and peppering websites with pictures, videos and graphics can take target audience connectivity to a whole new level. For example food websites generally perform better with great appetising photography and enticing location shots. For example: The Soul Origin website has amazing food photography.
Use colours that guide the user and set the mood
Website colouring is so much more than simply picking and choosing shades that you like. The colours should match the feel of your brand and product. Consider your audience, what do they like? Colour palettes should be designed to enhance the user experience while simultaneously creating balance and harmony.
The psychological effects of colour can also be employed to enrich the user experience and even boost sales. For example, blues portray a serious and trustworthy feeling, orange conveys earthy freshness and red communicates many things such as urgency, danger, hunger, sexiness or love. Draw attention to key buttons such as BUY buttons by using strong colours in contrast to your site background.
Lightning fast load times
Slow load times jeopardise bottom lines, with statistics reporting that the average user waits just six to 10 seconds before abandoning a page. Keep it speedy! A good web design agency should be able to optimise your site to load in 2-3 seconds!
Keep these design elements in mind and you’ll be on-track to creating a website that’s functional, beautiful and above all, effective.