DEV Community: Jack Rapid

How to improve sales with Web Design

Jack Rapid — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:15:44 +0000

Someone may think that just the fact of having a website helps to improve online sales or contacts. That’s not true. Your business’ sales will improve only if your website quality is immediately perceived by the users, and they are encouraged to have specific behaviours while visiting your website.

A utterly important factor, in this context, is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), whose aim is to understand visitors and customers’ behaviour to give them what they need, and this by improving the site elements. When everything is done properly, this will generate higher profits.

As often happens, the devil is in the details. The truth is that if you want to achieve a top-performing sales funnel, all conversion points on the website must be perfectly optimised, so when someone is visiting the website is encouraged to follow a specific path.
The starting point has to be your audience. Studies show that 96 percent of site visitors are not ready to buy. This means that you have to convince them that you can help them providing a good service or product.

Another crucial factor is that your website must provide high quality content and User Experience (UX) to lead your audience closer to the sale. We are talking about exceptional and bespoke design as well as smooth and easy navigation to keep your site visitors engaged.
CRO is related to different factors; our focus, in this article, will be on how to improve CRO (and, consequently, sales) with good web design in Northern Ireland.

How to improve sales with Web Design

In terms of web design and CRO, there are two main factor you should be acknowledged of: User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). User Interface focuses on how the website looks like, while User Experience on how easy is to navigate and
While it is useful to talk about them as two different things (especially if you want to make an analysis to get the best results from your website), they are deeply connected, and sometimes they could even merge.
Anyway, what we have to know is that a good web design includes quality UX and UI at the same time.

Design

It won’t take too long for your visitors to have an impression on your website. And you have to be sure the first impression is good.
It takes approximately 50 milliseconds, for a user, to form an opinion on a website based on a visual appreciation.
If your page is poorly designed, this will increase the bounce rate (which is the percentage of users that exit after visiting only one page).
But if your website is well designed, the chances they navigate it will improve. There are many factors that help in that sense:

bespoke and eye-catching website design
consistent branding
high-quality imagery and videos
clear and easy to read titles and text
good use of colours, with the right contrast

Navigation

When users visit a website, they could have different purposes. Visitors could be interested in buying a product online, or learning something more about a specific topic, or even they could be there because they need a service that you offer. Obviously this depends on the purposes of your website and, more generally, of your business.
For this reason you have to be sure that everything is clear. If you sell a product, make sure that all the informations and prices are there. If you have a blog, make sure it is well written and useful for those who read it. If you offer a service, make crystal clear how this service can help the people.
To put it simply: make sure the navigation is as easy as possible.
To sum up: providing quality design and navigation is fundamental to ensure a conversion focused web design. You must be sure that the best practices are applied to your web design to turn your site visitors into paying customers. This is how conversion rate optimisation (CRO) works when applied to web design.

How Web Design factors can Boost the Sales

1. High Quality Web Design
Ok this sounds pretty obvious. Nonetheless, it is still worth mentioning it as first factor. An eye-catching, bespoke web design, with quality visuals and photos, tailored to your brand, is simply the minimum you should aim for. A high-quality web design is an investment that will last years

2. Provide a Responsive Design for Mobile
Nowadays responsive design for mobile devices is a must, as half of the worldwide online navigation is provided by smartphones. So you have to be sure to provide high quality and navigation not only on desktop but also for tablets and smartphones

3. Provide Fast Page Load Speeds
None likes a slow website! Users expect the website to load in 2 or 3 seconds. After that, the chance they will quit the website will improve drastically. For this reason, one of the main targets for a web designer should be to balance design and speed. Videos, animations, complex structure could be nice, but if you want to use them, be sure your hosting service is fast and reliable and the pages are optimised for the highest performances.

4. Clear Navigation
We already mentioned User Experience (UX). This is fundamental when you have to think about your website’s navigation. Simply, provide an organised navigation that is easy yo use. This will help people to find your products and services faster.

5. Provide a clear Call To Action (CTA)
We cannot stress enough in terms of how good and bespoke design is essential in terms of branding and online identity. But even in this context, you have to be sure that your main CTA button is always clear and easy to see. This button is the direct path towards a conversion. So make sure it is clear to see, strategically placed to be sure that visitors can easily click it if they want to. A good idea could be to use a specific colour for your main CTA – obviously aligned to your branding’s palette colour.

6. Homepage is your online store window
Most of the times users will be landed to your homepage. For this reason be sure that this page is perfectly designed and provides the most useful information and CTAs for the users, especially in the top sections. This will help to convert visits in contacts and/or sales.

7. Use white spaces
Someone could think that white spaces are passive areas, and reducing them to be helpful to provide more informations. The truth is that white spaces are active elements in a good web design. Our eyes get confused when there are too many elements to focus on. White spaces help in balancing the elements, leading the eye to focus on those you want to. Helping the visitor with this kind of “visual breathing” will help to ease the navigation towards your website.

8. Showcase Trust
There are many factors that help the user to trust your website. Be sure your website showcases them. Placing a consistent logo where’s needed (on the menu, on the footer, the favicon), security or sector-related badges, testimonials from you clients, awards, partnerships: these are factors that will help to improve the trustfulness of the people visiting your website.

Conclusion

Website Design impacts hugely in terms of a wider Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) strategy, as will help the customers while visiting your website.

How to Improve UX

Jack Rapid — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 07:26:31 +0000

How to Improve UX

In a modern digital marketing strategy, the website is often the backbone of a business’ online presence. Websites are so important as they are a place you can tell your present and potential customers who you are, what makes your business unique, talk about your products and services – but also give audiences a good impression of your business through strong aesthetics and branding.

It is not only about having a website, you need a well-built website. There are many factors that make a website successful. Today we’re going to have a look on how to improve UX websites.

What is UX in Website Design?

User experience (UX) website design is the process that makes a website easy to navigate, providing it’s audience the most pleasing and relevant experience while visiting your website. Responsiveness, website speed, accessibility and of course a good design are among the factors that provide a quality UX.

Why is UX Website Design important?

Website UX impacts hugely on the customers’ behaviour while visiting your website. A great UX will provide users with a seamless visit to your website, allowing them to get what they need from the website.

Providing the visitor the best possible navigation is simply essential. Spending more time on a well-built website and appreciating the navigation helps to build trust for the brand and gives the customer an insight into the quality of the brand.

Also, a longer navigation on a website helps to increase the conversions – whether they are about contacting you or buying a product.

Nowadays, users and their experience while navigating a website are one of the most important factors when designing websites.

How to improve UX for Northern Irish Websites

1. Think as a user

The first, simple rule of UX is to think as a user. With this mindset the web designer can communicate with the client to understand their needs.

Although it is important to make sure your design and content are both of the highest standard, here the focus is not on the design, nor on the content.

Here the focus is on what the user expects to find on the website, in all its pages and sections.

You have to be sure that your website provides the most useful information at first glance, ensure it is easy to use, loads fast and is easy to navigate on desktop, mobile and tablet. The website structure must be clear, no one wants to visit a website that looks like a labyrinth!

It is not about ‘us’ – whether ‘us’ refers to the designer or the owner of the website, it is about the website’s users, as the main aim is to provide them with the best possible experience while they visit the website.

2. The right message: images and words

Putting the user first will reflect on all pages of the website. You should be asking yourself; what I am going to communicate to the visitors? And most importantly, how can I communicate my message in the most effective way?

3. Branding

There are many ways to tell the people who you are. The ‘about us’ page is a must have, and social media channels can help as well. There are subtler and more efficient ways – IMAGES!

Throughout the website you can provide different types of images. Among the most important, you need to provide your logo. We cannot highlight enough the importance of an effective logo for your business. This is not about your website or your online presence: this is about your brand’s identity.

Providing to the users a coherent, consistent and quality logo through the website gives them a clear understanding of who you are.

The logo should be placed on your top bar. Many websites place it on the top left, whilst the menu is on the top right.

Another must-have position is the favicon, which is the little icon placed in browser tabs. Considering the dimensions of favicon, here you should provide just the image, as text would not be easily read.

4. Credibility

Using stock images, especially on a key page, is something to avoid. Simply, put authentic and quality images representing you and your business across the website, as this will define your identity at a first glance.

Providing client testimonials is a great way to enhance trust and authenticity of your business. You can ask for testimonials on Google My Business or Facebook, the feedback provided by your past customers will help the potential customers have a clearer understanding about you, your business and the services you provide.

5. Navigation

Provide the right amount of choices on the menu. Remember that providing an excessive amount of possibilities can be overwhelming for the user. If you have a lot of pages on your website, you should give a well-defined hierarchy to the pages, and opt to put some pages as sub items on the menu.

Also be sure that you don’t have broken links on the website. There are different tools to check this, a free solution for a small website could be DeadLinkChecker.

To fix this, be sure that 404 and 301 errors lead to specific pages or creating an engaging 404 error page.

If your website has a huge amount of pages, enabling onsite search is helpful in finding the right information quickly.

6.Site speed

Users do not have the patience for a slow website! Optimise the images, serving them in a proper resolution, and use a lazy load tool to load the image only when it is shown on screen.

Caching tools are also helpful to improve the speed of the website for returning visitors.

7. Readability

Online has its own rules, even when it comes to how text is written and displayed. Break the text up in different paragraphs and use subtitles to improve readability and UX.

Also make sure that the space between the lines is enough to ease the reading.

Conclusion

Website UX impacts hugely on the customers’ behaviour while visiting your website. A great UX will provide the visitors with what they need from the website.