Tips for Improving Your Web Design
When it comes to web design in digital marketing , there are so many different styles and directions in which your website can go: it can be anywhere from classy to minimalistic, from playful and vibrant to sleek and modern. While your final look-and-feel should exude your personal style, line of work, and brand identity, there are a few ground rules that are always applicable. Great web design feeds into your user experience and functionality, while being easy to understand at first glance. here are 3 website tips to ensure that you’re going in the right direction in your redesign and are assuring you aren’t turning visitors away.
1. Have a plan For Your Web Design
Now that you’ve acknowledged that your site likely needs some improvements, it’s time to work your way backward and create a plan detailing how you’ll tackle them.
Start by mapping out your customer journey from the first time someone visits your website to the moment they become a customer.
When doing this, think about which pages are they going to view, what content are they going to read, and what offers are they going to convert on. Understanding this will help you design a site that actually helps nurture leads through the sales funnel.
I’ve always liked Lead feeder’s customer journey map as a great example. You don’t need to make it as graphical as they did, but it gets the point across. It illustrates what users do when visiting their website and what commonalities occur between those who do and do not become customers.
2. Remove distractions and reduce friction
Certain elements on your website are going to detract from the value and message you’re trying to convey. Complicated animations, content that’s too long, and “stocky” website images are just a few examples.
With an audience that only has an attention span of eight seconds, you need to make it abundantly clear what your user will learn on the page they’re viewing and your design must not detract from this.
This starts with making sure you have consistent brand guidelines you can work off of.
This should detail your font styles, colors, imagery, iconography, and logo usage. Without this, it’s easy for brands to struggle when designing pages. You’ll likely start to see arbitrary colors and varying font styles and sizes used, which in turn, can distract from your message or create visual confusion for people trying to convert.
It’s also important to avoid too many on-page animations or interactions. If you’re scrolling through a page and see every button pulsing or a section of icons each with their own animation, it can feel overwhelming and distract them from reading what’s on the page.
3. Add social proof
If you shop like most people when you’re on Amazon, chances are you gravitate towards products that contain mostly four to five-star reviews from people who wrote out their experiences with a product.
In looking at these reviews, we gain trust in the product that it will do what it promises and we need it to do, which in turn, pushes us to purchase it.
The same effect is applied to your product or service and website. If users see impactful testimonials from real people, studies show your prospects are 58% more likely to buy your product.
But how should your testimonials visually look so they effectively create that trust with your users when they see them?
Well, there are a few strategies you can take. But first, you need to think about what format of testimonial you want, text or video. Historically, video testimonials have been found to be the best. This is because the medium naturally keeps your user’s attention for longer and also builds a stronger human connection being able to hear voices and see faces of real people.
You also have the option of text testimonials, however, which, when designed and incorporated properly, will still help build trust with your users.
Upland Adera is an enterprise email and marketing automation software company in the United Kingdom. They have four videos on their testimonial page that each are contained in their own sections.