Your website is a critical piece of your business —design it like one! Billions of dollars in spending decisions are influenced by web sites. As a matter of fact, research shows that xxx % will not buy from a company with a crummy website. So why aren’t businesses focused on designing their sites to optimize the user experience and maximize their website’s impact?
Web design can do more than make a site look good—it can be a powerful strategic weapon that enhances financial returns and creates competitive advantage. If it is time to make your websites accountable then we should talk.
Elements of Website Design
“Virtually all websites have a persuasive purpose. To change what people think and do online, you need to first clarify your target outcomes and then make sure everything leads to those outcomes.” By building your website with this in mind, it will result in more visitors completing the conversion goals set out on your website. Some of the elements of Website Design include”
- Graphics or Visual Design – Aesthetics
- Usability or Visual Design – Functional
- Navigation or Structure
- Interactivity
- Persuasion or Conversion
- Content or Writing and Images
- Platform
- Responsiveness
Nobody Says it Will Be Easy
If you have been around a while then you gather a perspective and insight from businesses, industries and your peers. You quickly realize: nothing is easy… nothing is simple. Because, as Richard Cracroft has said,
“I have learned a Important Principle: Simple Things work, often to our dumbfounded surprise, for we tend to distrust the simple and strive for the complex”
Great website design is not just pretty colors, fancy graphics or good content. All those things are just the beginning. The basic website design that assumes people enter on the home page and and navigate through in a logical order is a thing of the past. The expectation that users will “work their way through” to get the answers they seek is non-sensible. It is no longer enough to tell the visitor or user what you want them to know about your company or brand, we must also know what the visitor needs to know about us. We must also tell our story.
Storytelling
Every brand has a story—the story has a logo and a reputation. The story includes expectations and history and promises and social cues and emotions. The story tells us Product X is good and Product Y is not. A really good story makes us say we “Love Product X”.
Part of the story might be that we need to help people understand their needs and feel their emotions. Businesses that understand not only the what of their product and service but also the why are able to connect with the emotional needs of their visitors and engage them. This engagement invariably pulls a heart string. Sometimes it is a memory we have of how that brand made us feel once. Sometimes it is the expectation of how the brand will make us better in the future. Sometimes the brand reinforces our self image and gives us a chance to love something about ourselves.
More than ever, we express ourselves with what we buy and how we use what we buy. Purchases become extensions of our personality, representations of ourselves, reminders of who we are or would like to be.
Great websites don’t just present businesses. They give the business meaning.
