Web design has grown from almost nothing to a huge global industry in little more than 10 years. The approach and solutions we use have changed significantly as we learn from research into why some sites work and others don’t. This article will explain the most important factors in non technical terms and how you should apply them to your own business.
Keep design clean and simple
Early website design was dominated by the fact that most people got it wrong. We all thought that making elaborate designs with super cool Flash intros would tempt people to stay on our sites, but in fact it just made them difficult to navigate or change the content and distracted people’s eyes from reading the message. Some web designers will still tell you that image is everything but that’s only because they’ve never run a profitable website, or worse, they know that by over designing a site they can charge more and use it to attract new clients for themselves. Of course a site must look professional and must support your company brand but clean and simple sites always work best. Understanding how people use websites has been the subject of millions of pounds of research; so if artistic design was beneficial then the big players would use it, but you only have to look at Google, ebay, Microsoft etc. to see that they don’t. Never forget that websites are software and it’s amazing how many people struggle with learning any new program.
Don’t loose your visitors
The salesman’s mantra is attention, interest, desire, action; so let’s see how this applies to a website. Firstly the attention part must be done away from the website so we’ll discuss this later. When you’ve only got text and pictures to display on a computer screen it’s getting the visitors interest and action that’s the difficult part. From statistics we know that telesales can generate about 1 in 10 leads, direct mail 1 in 100, whereas website tend to be more like 1 in 1000. Imagine if your salesman was not allowed to speak but only show people small text for 5 to 10 seconds before they leave. Unlike print, where designers can excel by making things interesting to pick up and look at, on a computer screens bright graphics will always distract people’s eyes so unless it’s the one thing you want them to look at, don’t do it. It may be boring but the formula that works is standard navigation with lots of clear headings and short paragraphs of text. And make the ‘call to action’ stand out. Websites are not good at convincing people to buy but they are a cheap way to generate leads and support or facilitate your sales.
Attracting new visitors
Getting people’s attention is one of the real strengths of the Internet as good sites can generate hundreds of new leads every day at virtually no cost. You can’t trick Google any more but if you are the biggest company in your field then you should have the top website. Designing a perfectly structured site for Google is now quite easy and these days it’s all about having good content that people want to visit and recommend. The optimization required to prove this must be done off site and if you are only interested in convincing Google then it can be a huge amount of work, however, if you use the Internet properly to communicate with your clients then you should see huge benefits and improve your ranking at the same time. Currently the important areas are forums, book-marking, article sites, blogs and RSS feeds. If you’re not using them then you should be.
Adding rich media
One thing to always remember is that we normally communicate with sound and vision, not just text. With broadband sound and videos are very easy to provide and the computer games research shows that using sound, not text, in software really helps. Currently this has not been widely adopted by websites but it’s worth a try.
The way we build websites has changed.
Compare the performance and style of an old hand made car with that of a modern Ford Focus. In exactly the same way many websites are still being assembled by hand and looking great, but giving terrible performance. These days automated solutions create much better sites for next to nothing so the only thing you need to pay for is the time to set them up, someone else to add the content and a specialist to advise on how to use them correctly. We are now in an age where putting text and pictures online is cheaper and easier than writing a letter and it’s only a matter of finding the appropriate software and getting advice on how to integrate the different website types within your business.
Try one of the new generation of website programs here
Or read more about how to communicate through a computer screen
