Web Design & Website Conversion

"SITES... Building an Online Presence that Speaks to Your Audience"

Your website is your company’s main web property online.  It is where you house all of the information about your company, your products and services.  It may not be the first point of contact for your consumers (they are likely hitting your targeted search advertising campaigns, landing pages and social media marketing profiles first), but it is definitely where your consumers end up validating your industry expertise and brand credibility.  This means it is important that the web design for your company’s site is visually appealing, optimized for website conversion and contains many content-rich pages.

Your Web Design Should Make a Great First Impression

We all know how important first impressions are when it comes to person-to-person interactions. Similarly, your online interactions (specifically your website) will also result in critical first impressions, on many occasions causing you to either win or lose a sale.  The difference is that the time you have to make a great first impression online is quite short.  Consumers will generally give your website 8 seconds of their valuable time to help them decide if this is where they want to continue learning about the product or service they are looking for.  This means your web design not only needs to be visually appealing, but it needs to be informative enough to help them determine in those short 8 seconds that your website is providing them the details they were searching for.  A visually impactful web design can directly affect your website conversions and might be the determining factor of converting a mere visitor into a lead, and a lead into a customer.

We have all heard time and again, consumers will often judge a book by its cover and you cannot risk losing potential customers because your site’s web design fails to attract and tell them what they need to know quickly.  Content marketing   and web design go hand-in-hand, so take the necessary steps to use your design to attract visitors to your content. 

Ensure Your Site is Optimized for Website Conversions

Even if you are on the first page of Google it doesn’t always mean success. What it means is you will get impressions and some traffic but what you need to understand is how to get them to stay on your website. Most sites, even today, lack a focused strategy around converting that traffic into business. Most people think this just happens, but the reality is that it doesn’t. You need to understand the key components of website conversion to make this happen.

When we say “how does your site convert or what is your website’s conversion rate,” we often see this dazed look in our clients’ faces as if to say what do you mean?  Looking at the word “conversion”, we define it as “a way of getting someone to take a predetermined action that you want to track and measure”. The key is to understand what the impact of that action means to your business; this will ultimately determine what you need to be doing from a website conversion perspective and directly relate to your overall internet marketing success.

 Here are some of the key strategies to ensuring your site is optimized for website conversion 

• Using imagery effectively can contribute significantly to keeping the visitor on the site and improving the websites’ bounce rate.
• Color has a significant effect on behavior. Choosing the right color palette for your website is incredibly important in establishing the proper mood and displaying your product or service in the right light.
• Our studies have shown that you must consider your target audience while working on your site’s overall layout. Consider the various personas you are targeting and how they will look at the information being displayed.
• By adding a phone number in the top right of every page and a small contact form to every page where you want to capture a website conversion, your leads from website visitors can go up by at least 5 times.
• We often recommend that on each key page of your site that your contact form is set up with a separate auto responder that speaks to the key message or product on that page.
• Structure content in small chunks, use effective titles and provide point form notes as much as possible. Doing so will invite higher readership and a lower your bounce rate!
• An effectively written call-to-action (usually written in 8 words or less) can help improve visitor “time on site” significantly.

WSI Consultants are well versed in web design and website conversion best practices, so be sure to contact us today to help your website achieve its full potential