14 Tips for Improving Your Web Design (Part 2)

7. Let Your Visitors Scroll on Your Homepage
Above the fold is old. Don’t be wary of designing a slightly longer homepage. Including 3-5 sections that help direct new and recurring users to proper areas of your site can help create a seamless experience.

But what should these sections be? This list could go on forever, but a quick hit-list of some of the more crucial elements includes:

• Value proposition
• Intro Video
• Overview of Services
• Product Features
• About Us
• Testimonials
• Case Studies/Success Stories
• Resources

8. Don’t be Afraid of White Space
Whitespace is an essential design element that helps you break up the page and increase readability.

Also called ‘negative space’, white space refers to the areas around elements on a page that are empty and lacking content or visual items.

Although extra space may seem superfluous, it’s actually responsible for readability and content prioritization. It also plays an important role in the design process and positioning website design elements.

If you know of some pages lacking white space, review the page and strip elements or content that aren’t necessary to the purpose of the page. Then, make sure this content is properly grouped so users are able to distinguish where they belong on the page.

9. Mobile Optimization
Don’t forget about optimizing your site for mobile. If you don’t already know, 80% of internet users own a smartphone, and “Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead”.

I’d be a little concerned if I were you.

It’s a necessity to tailor your site to fit the needs and wants of your visitors. You might want to ask yourself, why would someone access my site on mobile? What things would they look for? Does my experience currently allow them to do those things easily?

10. Get Found
If you want to develop a substantial online presence, then you need to create a website that can get found.

This starts with developing an SEO strategy that takes into consideration the search terms your buyer personas and audience would search for. This strategy terms should include creating content that’s relevant to the needs of your visitors. Videos, blog articles, and e-books are a few examples of content that can do this.

Make sure you don’t get too sidetracked with the endless content possibilities you could rank for. Identify the proper keywords first that your audience is actually searching for so you aren’t attracting too many visitors who’d never convert to your product, let alone your offers.

11. Never Stop Testing
Evaluating conversion paths, how far users scroll, and where they are clicking, etc, are important qualities that can reveal if your pages are performing the way you intended.

If you’re someone that has tons of pages to go through, chances are you may find this issue on a lot of pages, especially older landing pages. Pages like these may actually be performing quite well, but contain outdated information that you know could be updated. Others may just need some tweaking updates or design changes.Simple changes such as button colors, headers, or adding a few sentences in your copy could make incredible differences in the page’s performance.

But rather than changing them and set them on their way, especially if you don’t know what to change, you can use tools to create A/B tests for them, multi-variant tests, or even set up heat maps to see what users are doing. Each test can reveal more a variety of data that identifies why users are interacting with pages in particular ways.

12. Identify Unknown 404’s or Broken Links
Depending on the size of your website, or how long it’s been around, you may actually have a few pages or links here and there that aren’t working. And on top of all that, your visitors won’t even let you know.

Take the time to evaluate whether or not your site has broken pages. You may be surprised to find previously high performing landing pages that are unpublished or website pages that are improperly linked.

13. Create New or Unique Offerings
Converting visitors is the core way you can evaluate how many users are moving down your marketing funnel. Many of us know that the way you typically convert visitors is by presenting offers, demos, or items that they will find attractive.

But with so many resources out on the internet, it’s now more difficult than ever to break through the noise and get people converting on yours.

This means it’s more important than ever to not only pay attention to what offers and resources are out there within your service area, but what isn’t too.

Maybe you’re a social media company who notices many other competitors are making eBooks on how to create a social media calendar. Rather than creating a similar offer, could you take it a step further and create a tool that allows people to enter in some information that helps generate a schedule that syncs to their Google calendar?

If this seems too complicated, you could also try identifying templates that aren’t currently widely available and quickly creating one and promoting it.

Whatever your decision, it’s important to make sure what you are doing is a step above your competitors. Copying content offers that are currently out there will only keep you lost at sea.

14. Update Your Content To Appeal to Your Persona
When you’re writing copy that you want to impress your website visitors with, many of us tend to fall into a dangerous trap.

The content is ‘we’ and ‘our’ focused.

‘We will increase revenue by..”, “Our benefits include…” are just examples of the headers that many uses throughout web pages. Although you may be showcasing the ways your business might help because of how great you and your products are, it’s not going to get the point across.

Strip out the “we’s” and “our’s” and replace them with “you’s” and “your’s”. Your potential customers want you to meet them eye-to-eye, understand the pain points they have, and directly explain how they could be solved.

So rather than a header like ‘Our Case Studies’, try something like ‘Your Potential Success Story’. Or rather than a careers page that focuses how great the company is, filter in some content that explains how applicants futures are important and their ability to define their future working at your business.

This grammatical switch may seem insignificant, but subconsciously it will affect the way customers see your business.

Source: https://www.impactbnd.com/