When it comes to lead conversion, marketing strategy is not the only thing that matters. Moreover, all the greatest, most well-known strategies will mean nothing without a well-designed website.
Creating websites can honestly be considered a work of art. It requires skill, knowledge, and experience. If your company doesn’t provide web design and development services, you shouldn’t delve into this process on your own because it will lead to immense amounts of wasted time and perhaps even money. The best way to produce a sound, cohesive, and effective website is to hire one of the professional and reputable top creative agencies in the world. There are quite a few good web design companies out there, so it will be no problem finding one that is able to provide you with all the solutions and services you need.
But what makes a website sell? How can a site help increase your client conversions and, thus, lead to a higher ROI? According to research conducted on websites in the health industry, over 90% of feedback showed that the design components of a page significantly affected its visitors’ trust. Therefore, several factors make a website’s design good, and that is crucial to customer conversion. Aesthetics
Although this could seem trivial, when it comes to marketing your brand on the web, users seriously tend to judge books by their covers. In other words, your website’s appearance pretty much reflects your brand’s professionalism.
If your website doesn’t look appealing, it’s not going to make an excellent first impression on its visitors. As a result, they will not consider you a professional brand, and this, in turn, will hurt the potential trust you might’ve built if your website had been appropriately designed. They will leave your website and look for their needed solution at your competitors’ sites.
User-Friendliness
Often, users leave sites just because they have no idea how to find whatever they came looking for. Websites with complicated and unclear navigation will never keep users for long, and their web traffic metrics will gradually go lower and lower. If you want your company website to be user-friendly, it must have simple navigation.
- In other words, no marketing strategies, tactics, or solutions will pull your brand through the competition unless you have a good website design with clear and straightforward navigation.
- Responsive Design
People all around the world are increasingly becoming mobile users. That is, more and more people by the day are using smartphones and tablets to surf the internet. It’s even safe to assume that most online users search using mobile gadgets and not desktop computers.
Therefore, it’s necessary to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile use. Otherwise, get ready for some serious issues. If your company didn’t optimize its website for mobile gadgets, a large fraction of your audience, those that primarily surf the web from their smartphones and tablets would not be able to load and view it comfortably. They will quickly leave your site, that’s for sure. But what’s even worse is that your website will get penalized in the mobile search rankings on search engines. It will make your site harder to find for mobile users, leading to a decline in web traffic.
Thus, you should make sure that the web agency you hire will make your website responsive to resolution changes and mobile platforms.
Content Readability
One of the first things users do, while visiting a webpage is scanned the text content to look for the things they need. If poor readability prevents users from finding what they are looking for, they will inevitably move on to a different site with similar content.
If you want your site to have readable content, you should take the following into account:
- Typography. Although there are aesthetically pleasing fonts, such as cursive-style ones, they can be hard to read quickly. Moreover, if overused, such fonts make webpages look too cluttered. Therefore, make sure your web design agency uses easy-to-read, clean, and simple fonts. It’s also best to avoid using more than two fonts on a page (and, if you want your website to be consistent, this should be the general rule for the entire site). Using too many different fonts will make your site look inconsistent and messy;
- Contrast. Make sure that the text color contrasts with the site’s background colors. That is, using a dark blue background with dark purple graphics and fonts is not the best idea. The background color should either be much lighter or darker than the color of the text on the page.
- Blank spaces. If you want to add readability to the text, it’s best to break it up into blocks. Discuss the ways to do this with your agency. They can include various headers, numbers, bullet points, and other techniques. The point is, you don’t want to have a massive chunk of text on your page, because no one would want to scroll through and read it.
Website Performance
Appearance is not the only thing that matters on a website. The way it works is just, if not more important than how it looks. Links on your site that don’t lead anywhere or are broken are going to harm the user experience. And, if the user has poor experience on a website, they will not want to waste their time trying to make sense of its use.
Also, it’s important to make sure that loading speeds are high. Visitors inevitably abandon sites that load too slowly because no one wants to wait more than a few seconds for a web page to load. Three seconds is the limit people will wait for a page to load.
Conclusion: Conversion Opportunities
One of the first and foremost goals of quality web design is to grab the user by the hand and walk them through your website, regardless of their current position in the sales funnel. For instance, if you visit a site that seems to have something you’re looking for and you’re in the very first stages of the sales funnel, the easier it is finding the information about the services or products you need, the further you get down the funnel you will go.
Speaking of users that are at the end of the funnel, it’s important to make sure that you have relevant calls-to-action (CTAs) in place that guides them in their further actions. Whether you want the user to sign up for a newsletter or make an actual purchase, CTAs are a must for any useful website today. Without them, converting visitors will be a much harder task.
Web design is critical for your business, and you need the assistance of a reliable web design agency to create a quality and high-performing website. Discuss with your agency all the possibilities, outline your goals and mission, emphasize what you want to achieve, and see what the team has to offer. Once you have a reliable website up and running, you can sit and watch your conversion rates grow.