1 December 2011

Five Things to Watch Out for When Designing Your Webpages

We would suggest that if you want to maximise the revenue generated from your website that your website’s visitors should design your website so that it works for them and therefore you.

With this in mind we have come up with this list of five potential problems to watch out for when designing your website’s pages and the fixes for them:

1. Lack of Credibility and Trust
   Problem: The visitor doesn’t know who you are therefore the visitor doesn’t know who you are so why should they trust you and buy from you?
   Fix: Borrow and Solidify Trust – Feature endorsements and trust symbols prominently, use client logos/brands/media coverage as “badges” and remove anxiety with generous policies and guarantees.
2. Unclear Call to action
   Problem: The visitor is unclear as to what to do on the page therefore they’ll spend precious time deciding what to do and get confused and frustrated
   Fix: Strengthen your call-to-action (cta):  Making sure the cta is clear and draws the eye and that the cta should be “above-the-fold”
3. Visual Distractions
   Problem: The visitor doesn’t know where to look and therefore gets confused and annoyed because there is no clear separation of content and navigation
   Fix: Make it boring – Don’t compete with the call-to-action, review/remove colourful page elements and animation/motion and replace generic photos with specific relevant images
4. Not Keeping Your Promises
   Problem: The advert mentions a service or offer that is not easily found on the landing page. Therefore the Potential clients feels mislead because this page is not what they expected and they disconnect and leave.
   Fix: Keep Your Promises: Repeat the ad-text or keywords on your landing page and provide clear access to information from the advert
5. Too Much Text
   Problem: Do you really expect the visitor to read all of the text on your landing page? Visitors have short attention spans don’t use it all up on over complicated explanations otherwise the visitor may be daunted by all the text and click the ‘back’ button.
   Fix: Shorten Your Text: Put important information first, use short bullet point lists and ruthlessly edit and shorten your text