How do you get a website developed that will deliver growth for your business? How do you make sure your hard-earned cash isn’t thrown away on another failed web design project? Read on to discover 5 web design secrets that will help your business to grow and thrive!
1). Function over form
Many people consider web design to be an art form and this is true, to a certain degree. There is an art to designing a good-looking web page and aesthetics plays an important role in conveying a strong brand image. But that said, creating a high performing website which will deliver growth for your business relies more on science than art. To put it bluntly, without focusing on the science part, your website will fail, no matter how pretty it looks.
The user experience of your website should always take priority over appearance. The truth is (and this might hurt), your users don’t care what your website looks like. They just want to get from A to B quickly and easily in as few steps as possible. This holds even more truth now that many of your users will be viewing your site on mobile devices. Fancy designs just don’t work very well on small screens.
If your website can look good and get outstanding results, that’s great… But don’t compromise function over form. Start by understanding your user data, build wireframes to develop your user journeys and, only then, should you focus on the website aesthetics.
2). Watch your speed!
The loading speed of your web page really is important. So much so that Google has made this, quite publicly, a key ranking factor. The reason for this is due to the link between the time it takes for your page to load and the likelihood of a user remaining on your page. Consider the following stats:
- 53% of users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
- 47% of website users expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less.
- 40% of online shoppers will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- A one second delay can result in a 7% decrease in conversions.
- A one second delay when viewing a website on a mobile device can result in a 20% decrease in conversions.
- Amazon have stated that a 100ms delay in load time resulted in a 1% decrease in revenue.
Looking at the above stats it’s clear that page speed can directly affect your business revenue. Google strives to serve the most relevant websites with the best user experience, so if your site is slow, your rankings will drop. It’s a no brainer. Focus on improving your page speed to increase your rankings and keep your visitors happy!
3). Test, test and test again!
Many businesses get a lovely new website developed and then leave it in the hope that it will perform. This is a sure-fire path to failure. Websites just don’t perform well without fine tuning and making regular improvements and enhancements. The only way to really get underneath your website bonnet and find out what’s happening, is to carry out in-depth user analysis and testing. There are lots of tools available to help you understand how your users are interacting with your site. Google Analytics is the most popular, it’s free to use and will give you tons of data about your users – how long they’ve spent on each page, how many pages they’ve visited, exit pages, exit rate, bounce rate, plus loads more. You can use this data to identify the pages that have a high bounce rate or exit rate, which could highlight a potential issue, e.g. If visitors are exiting your site after visiting a certain page, this may suggest that there’s a problem which needs looking at.
Online software such as Hotjar allows you to view visitor heatmaps and recordings to see how your users are interacting with your pages. The heatmaps show you where your visitors are clicking and scrolling on the page, and the recordings show you the entire user journey for each visitor. This can be very useful in identifying trends and problem areas within your pages, or within the user journey.
Once you have carried out your testing and collected user data, the next step is to make your proposed improvements. This may be as simple as change the position of a button, or could be redesigning the layout of a form. Whatever changes you make, the most important thing to do is test, test and test again! If your changes do not work, then go back to the drawing board and try to understand why. If your changes do make a noticeable improvement, then that’s great, but don’t stop there… You need to keep improving and enhancing your website in order to reach your user experience utopia!
4). Design for Mobile-First
We’ve been pushing the mobile-first approach for several years, and it’s now more important than ever to follow this methodology. The data speaks for itself. More users are now searching and browsing on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops, and this means YOUR website visitors will be viewing YOUR site on their mobiles. No excuses now… Your website needs to be completely optimized for mobile viewing, or you’re going to lose a lot of potential customers! So how do you go about this?
First of all you need to get an understanding of your mobile users’ behaviour. You can do this by using some of the tools mentioned in point 3. There are also some significant stats that you should take into account when designing your mobile website.
- 46% of users will not buy from a company again if they have an interruptive mobile experience.
- 57% of users will not recommend a business if they have a poorly designed mobile site.
- 90% of B2B buyers are likely to buy from the vendor again if they have a good mobile website experience.
- 77% of B2B executives use their mobile to research a product or service for their business.
- 80% of mobile users are more likely to purchase from a company if their mobile website helps to easily answer their questions.
The above statistics demonstrate just how important your mobile website is for your business. Your customer-base is relying on your mobile site to provide them with easy access to information, products and services. And they’re willing to be ruthless if your site is not up to scratch.
5). Content is (still) king
The days of “lorem ipsum” are over. Filler text, Latin text, sample text, or whatever you want to call it has no place on your website, even during development. This may sound pedantic but using filler text is wrong on many levels – it belittles the importance of content as a design element – encourages content to be considered as an afterthought – and leads to a design being created without any knowledge of the page content, which is just madness!
Your content is the most important element on your web page. It is the headline which catches your potential client’s attention, the call-to-action which leads your visitor to the conversion page, the testimonial which reassures your potential customer of your trustworthiness. Content has the power to help and support your customers, convert your users into leads, leads into customers and customers into brand advocates. If you’re starting a website project and obsessing over the style, colours and fonts, stop what you’re doing! Take a moment and have a think about your content instead. After all, it will be the voice of your brand that seals the deal… Content is still king!
We strongly believe that Growth-Driven Design is the future of web design. By combining web design, data analytics, and marketing goals, your website will help deliver repeatable and scalable growth for your business. To find out how Growth-Driven Design can help your business, speak to our team for a friendly chat.
