1. Appearance
Creating a beautiful website is the first step to earning new customers.
The appearance of your website tells visitors more about your company than your words. A site that incorporates modern design elements, optimized images, and other multimedia is much better at converting customers than a website that looks like it’s from 1996.
As a result, the appearance of your website plays a huge role in its success!
This factor also includes incorporating responsive design into your site.
Responsive design is the technique of making your website re-size itself to fit on the screen of any device. So, whether someone’s looking at your site through an iPhone or a 27-inch desktop monitor, they’ll still get a great, easy-to-use experience.
That experience — often called user experience — is the first step in getting a new customer. When users see you have a sleek and attractive website, it’s easy to keep them on your site. But a good-looking website is just the beginning. You also need clear navigation.
2. Navigation
Navigation is the part of your website that lets people find what they want.
Modern websites have simplified navigation to work on desktops and mobile devices. One of the most popular and effective navigation elements is the breadcrumb. For an example of a breadcrumb, check out the image below.
Breadcrumb navigation got its name because it links to every page a person views as they move through your site — kind of like when Hansel and Gretel left a trail of breadcrumbs to follow in their fairy tale.
With breadcrumb navigation, your website’s users can jump back to any page they’ve previously seen. So, if you’re an ecommerce site, you can let someone go from a product page to a category page with one click.
If you profit through lead generation, you can use breadcrumbs to get users from information pages to index pages, so they can read and learn more about the same topic.
For example, a manufacturing website design may feature a breadcrumb menu that guides users from general to specific services, like coating services and then coating services for specific materials. This breadcrumb menu makes it easy for users to go back to the general service and find the service they need.
Breadcrumbs are just the beginning, though. You can also use mega menus like the one we have in our header. These menus feature big text, links to information centers, and additional links to specific topics.
With hundreds of other navigation styles available, there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s all about what works for your brand when it comes to providing a stellar experience for your users.
Giving them a great experience has another benefit, too — you hold their attention.
3. Attention
Once you have a visitor on your site, it’s crucial that you keep their attention. If you lose it, your visitor will leave your site, and you’ll miss out on a sale.
Attention is valuable because it keeps someone focused on your brand, products, and or services. So, if you want to make a sale, you need someone’s attention on your website.
With that in mind, different companies can hold attention in different ways, including:
Video marketing is especially effective at catching someone’s attention since video is a visually-oriented medium. Video empowers you to summarize complex ideas in a matter of minutes instead of forcing visitors to read long pages of text. While text can get boring after a few seconds, video keeps users enthralled from start to finish.
Downloadable content is another great way to keep someone’s attention. Most downloads can consist of a .zip file full of resources or a text-based PDF packed to the brim with insider information. This content is ideal for earning new leads as well since you can gate it and ask someone for their email address before they download the materials.
Infographics keep people’s attention by presenting industry-related data with simplified, easy-to-understand visualizations. Even though hundreds of new infographics come out every day, you can still earn traffic, attention, and links for infographics by holding yourself to a higher quality standard than your competitors.
Once you have your visitors’ attention, it’s time to give them a sense of direction on your page.
4. Direction
Direction refers to showing someone how they can proceed on your page — in most cases, this directs a user to scroll down your page. Vertical scrolling is the most common form of progression on websites because it’s simple, intuitive, and useful.
The catch is when you use vertical scrolling on your mobile site design.
While desktop users use a mouse or scrollbar to progress through your page, mobile visitors use their fingers. That means your mobile-side pages are easy for someone to tap, hold, and swipe so they can scroll just like your desktop users.
This design feature goes back to the concept of responsive design.
Responsive design may mean that all your site visitors get the same great experience, but how they get that experience is entirely different. Your desktop-compatible site might use mega navigation in the header with lots of drop-down menus and big, eye-catching visuals.
But that’s too much content in one area for a mobile site.
Instead, mobile sites should have a hamburger menu — a navigation style that lets users tap a button, open a menu, and choose their next page from there. Hamburger menus get their name from their distinctive symbol. You may recognize it as looking something like this:
With a hamburger menu, it’s simple for mobile users to navigate to any part of your website.
5. Action
Action is the ultimate goal of earning any new visitor to your website. But visitors won’t take action if you don’t encourage them! That’s why it’s so important to use a calls-to-action (CTAs) at the end of every page on your site.
A CTA acts as instructions, telling visitors what they should do next to get one step closer to becoming a customer. While that may sound bossy, studies prove that CTAs dramatically increase conversions in every online business model, from lead generation to charitable donations.
A graphic for the impact of CTAs in web design
Whether you want to get someone to a contact page or have them make a purchase, it’s essential to include CTAs in your web design. That’s why our team of copywriters develop compelling CTAs that support your digital marketing goals, from increasing email subscribers to product purchases.
CTAs can take the following forms:
- Text links
- Image links
- Buttons
- Form fields
- And more
It takes time, revisions, and editing to make a performance-driven website — something the BSG web design team has nailed down to a science. Working in your best interests, our web designers will create a website that fulfills these five tenants to make sure you succeed online.
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