Website Design Tips to Drive Sales
It’s good to see so many of them running their business through websites. A decade back it was totally unlikely, having a website was a luxury; today such thinking has been tossed aside for good. People have taken the first progressive step towards success, but are they being rewarded? There are certainly a large number of websites running, as per the reports from internetlivestats, there are over 1 billion websites hosted on the internet and sadly not all of them are having a successful growth. And the reason is they are poorly designed.
Yes, a majority of the websites appear to be some static business card, for they should be attractive and responsive to the customers. Business owners failing to takeoff do disappointingly do not understand that the market is running about how you appear for your customers. My point is your website design greatly speaks your credibility and honesty. A badly designed website is enough to keep you out of your customer’s line of sight and that is sufficient to keep you out of business.
Leads, conversions, sales, all these things happen only if customers like your website, decide to stay and finally make their mind to be a part of the conversion funnel. Driving sales can be a very long process for you, but for your prospects, it’s a decision they make in a matter of minutes after they land on your website, because everything stands on the visual appearance.
Things you gamble on When Designing a Website
- BRAND
- Does your website design speak brand consistency? A brand is more than just a logo; a lot of effort is required to make a brand recognizable. When you design a website you have to make sure that your brand is consistently appearing on the website, if not your customers may fail to have a connection with your business.
- CREDIBILITY
- If you are recognizable that means you are trustable. A poorly designed website can make your business look unprofessional, and chances are you may lose your credibility.
- CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
- The look and feel, this word combination is used a lot, but each of these factors has a different weight of influence on customers.
- Customer experience is what a customer feels using your website. For instance, a poorly designed navigation system can spoil his experience on your website and it might affect his loyalty towards your brand.
- POSITION ON SEARCH ENGINE LISTING
- Every element that has been explained is interdependent. You give a bad experience to customers and they will give you good bounce rate. While staking your position on the search engine list, you will fail to drive sales and this will impact the bottom line.
- “Always keep this in mind; your Website Design should be Visual First, then Informative.”
- In this post, you will find website design tips that create the best possible impression on your customers and help you drive sales for your business.
Web Design Tips for Improved Sales
TIP # 1: Care for Brand Consistency
- I guess we already spoke about brand once, right?
- So what exactly do you understand by maintaining brand consistency in your website design? The words are quite confusing to interpret if you are an amateur designing the website. You have used every element diligently designing your logo, but is your logo appearing consistently on your website?
- If you already have a recognized brand, then make sure it is incorporated into your website design. Let it appear consistently on the website. A customer generally seeks for something that will allow them to identify you among the flock and website branding is definitely something that attracts visitor’s eye.
TIP # 2: Maintain Good Visual Hierarchy
- Visual hierarchy helps you rank website elements based on your business objective. To make you understand this in a much better way, I’ll take a simple example.
- I have randomly drawn four circles of different sizes. If I ask you to rank them in ascending order you will not find it difficult, because it’s easier just by looking at the images.
- Quite similarly, let’s say you are selling branded watches, so your homepage should have an image of a person wearing that piece, seeing which you will feel wanting it. It should be followed by a headline to say what the product is, then a call to action button to push that customer to buy that product.
- You can even add a shipping banner and navigation at the top. This is just an example of how you achieve visual hierarchy for your website design.
- You should always start with the objective of your business. It’s a branded watch here, which has been prominently promoted on the web page and this how you make customers love your products.
TIP # 3: Ensure Good Browsing Experience
- It’s no secret, a well-performing website enjoy good traffic, high conversion rates. A good browsing experience is the most basic privilege people look for, something they cannot afford to give up.
- If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitors look for other options, they don’t wait till it completely loads because they don’t have time. Next thing is your website is not limited to just desktops, you have to serve mobile users and again if they encounter slow loading web page, it will impact your traffic and sales.
- In the year 2007 Amazon reported that for every 100ms increase in load time their sales reduced by 1%. You should make browsing experience an integral part of your web design workflow. Some of the techniques you can follow while designing website are,
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Minify HTML, CSS, & JavaScript
- Optimize images and videos
- Use Data URIs
TIP # 4: Keep the Design Responsive
- You know your target audience, but are you efficiently reaching them? You can never drive sales or improve your bottom line with a static website. Smartphone users are growing, more devices are coming and your website needs to be mobile.
- The content should have fluidity moving across every new device. You should not make customers pinch and zoom every time they want to read something from your website. Make use of responsive technology while designing your website, let customers feel easy navigating your website.
TIP # 5: Include Calls-to-Action
- You have an amazing website, great products, but is that helping your sale numbers?
- Of course, it will not be.
- For professional digital marketers, a CTA is the most important part of the conversion funnel. When a customer likes a product there should be some sort of element that would create a sense of urgency and push them to make a purchase.
- A CTA should be visible on the site content, home page, and landing page.
- Not only that it should be optimized – the text you use should be communicating some value, the color you use must stand out, the size, and place you keep it must speak logic and only then you can make it as a source to generate leads and improve sales.