While there are so many factors to consider when finding a great balance between design and conversion, here are 5 instant tips to consider and tweak to increase web conversion straight away.
1. Website Colours
Colours play a massive role in websites. Not only do they carry a psychological sway and role in influence, but they can also help divert attention to your calls to action, helping them contrast and stick out the page easily. Choosing the right background and font colours is a huge decision (not just matching the logo) as different colours evoke different emotions in your users. Try to find a great colour combination which makes your website user-friendly while still being unique.
2. Choose Buttons Over Links
People are more likely to click a button than a text link. Making your ‘Add to cart’, ‘View blog article’ or ‘Join my mailing list’ a button will have higher results than it simply being a text link. They are not just more noticable due to their size, but they naturally envoke an urge to hover and click – especially if they have a hover style effect to confirm this. Many tests have been done to confirm this and results showed 20-200% increases in relavant clicks when buttons were used.
3. Rules For Images
Images are a great way for showing off visual-based products or services as well as highlighting quality. Here are some basic rules to stick to when it comes to using images on your website:
- Use high resolution images – the bigger the better
- If eCommerce, use multiple images to get additional sales
- 3D swivel images have the best results
- Correctly complete the title and alt tags for SEO and image traffic
- Image lightboxes work well for product images
- Don’t use images in areas larger than the image actually is – they will just pixelate and blur
4. Website Content
A good design will usually blend a user-friendly layout, written content, visually-appealing images and stunning cosmetics. Single column layouts work really well as they limit the distractions on the page and force the user to read the text top to bottom rather than scanning left to right, top to bottom. Make sure text is written to be read, it has to be effective from a communication persepctive, designed exclusively to appeal to users and attract attention. Remember, you want pretty much all the text to be part of the overall pitch of the sales offer with no additional ‘waffle’. If it’s not useful to the visitors and doesn’t sell your business/service/product, don’t use it.
4. Tell People What To Do
Use strong visual design aids such as arrows pointing to forms or buttons to direct users to actually do what you want them to do. This can also be adopted successfully in images of people looking at the form or button, it actually helps website users also ‘look’ in the same direction. It sounds crazy but it works and big global companies have changed the orientation of people in images to actually look at the offer, form, headline on the page. Use design to funnel users to specific areas of the page that you want them to look at – primarily because it’s your ‘action area’, ie signup form, register button, ‘buy’ button.
