It’s easy to get carried away with looks when you’re designing a new website, but any experienced web designer knows that gorgeous is just not enough. The thing is that a pleasing look doesn’t count for much if your website is not designed with usability in mind.
Designing a great website is all about creating a pleasant and rewarding experience for your visitors. Just like you probably won’t return to a supermarket where all the products you need are hidden behind other things, people won’t come back to your website unless you make it easy for them to find the information they are looking for and get what they want done.
There are lots of things that you need to take into account to achieve this, starting from a well-organized structure for your web pages, to possibly implementing efficient and easy-to-use search facilities that allow your visitors to find things within your own website. Even something as apparently mundane as the naming and positioning of links to different parts of your website can have a huge impact on how easy it is to navigate.
Another fundamental thing to remember is that your website has to be very good at converting visitors to clients if it is to be successful. As you’ll surely agree, there is no point in having hundreds or thousands of visitors to your website every day if they are not becoming clients. And it is the up to your web designer to make sure that your website has what it takes to get people to make that crucial leap. Once again, there is a lot that can be done to improve your site’s conversion rate, and a lot of it has to do with creating the right look and feel and guiding visitors down the path to the sale as your website makes the case for your products or services.
Still, the biggest secret to achieving the most conversions out of your website is to test different elements against each other. How else will you know if ‘call to action A’ will perform better than ‘call to action B’, or if ‘image A’ will get more people to click the ‘Buy’ button than ‘image B’?
And don’t forget that apart from all this, your website must be quick to load or else people will just give up and go away before they even get a chance to see it!
