Here at Vital Hike, you can imagine we get all sorts of people who need all sorts of websites designed. In our time you can guarantee we’ve seen it all; from local businesses in Dundee and Fife wanting to get more customers into their shop to organisations just trying to encourage the spread of a message as far and wide as possible. Making a strategy that suits your website’s goal is really important, but here are a few basic website design tips to help guide you in the right direction:
1. Calls to action
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| Calls to action should be the main focus on your website |
One of the most important things for your
website to have is a call to action. A call to action is usually a goal of your
website, and usually takes the form of a ‘buy now’ or ‘contact us’ button.
Calls to action are important as most web
users are used to being guided through
a website easily, so calls to action often are highlighted to let a user know where
and what the next step is. Without this, many users are not interested enough
to spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to purchase from you or
get in touch – it’s faster for them to drop off your website and search for one
of your competitors more ‘user friendly’ websites.
To create a call to action, just bear in
mind what your website’s main goal is and create a call to action design that stands
out from your page.
2. Benefits, not features
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| Make sure you tell them what they'll get out of buying from you |
When writing content for your website, it’s
important to highlight the benefits that your product or service gives your
customers and not simply the features of your product or how it works.
Use descriptive text about how a person may
feel or what their life could be like
with your product or service. A persons purchase decision will be mainly based
on the benefits your product or service could bring to them compared to competitors
– so make sure you highlight these points in your text.
3. Short and to the point
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| Add 'find out more' links and give detailed information on those pages |
Keeping your message as simple as possible
is usually a good idea; give your website visitors the option to read more
details about your products or services if they need to, but keep your main pages
focussed on encouraging your customers to make a purchase.
If you need a lot of text to highlight all
of the benefits, break up your text into smaller chunks by adding images where
appropriate and using bullet points.
4. Don’t make information hard to find
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| This website might have all the information you need - but it's impossible to tell where it is! |
Make it as simple as possible for your
customer to get what they need; where possible, try and keep the number of
clicks someone needs to make on your website as low as possible (without
cluttering your entire homepage with a link to every page on your website).
A good way to test your current website is
to try to think of why people may be landing on your website and the
information they need before they make a purchase (like ‘how much is it?’ ‘how
long will it take?’ ‘Is this the best company for me?’) and go through your
website to see how many clicks it then takes you to find what you need.
5. Test, improve and test again!
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| Use In-Page Analytics to see where your visitors are clicking - and where they aren't! |
The first time you set up any website, it’s
going to be your best guess at what will work and what won’t. So our best
advice is to install Google analytics on your website and work with the stats
you get to keep improving your website.
Using things like Google’s in-page
analytics can help you figure out where people are clicking, and what actions
they are taking. If you notice that forms aren’t being filled in, or a certain
product hasn’t been looked at, move the link or button somewhere else, change
the text or design and test again to see if this gets you more sales.
You can also use Google’s ‘content experiments’
to test out different text you have written to see what works best.
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