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You know what you want your website to do: make your company look good and generate more business.

When someone visits your website, their initial expectations will be met or not within moments, moments that you can’t get back. These expectations do not necessarily have to do with your line of business, but with the most basic elements of that customer’s attention span.

Imagine standing at the door of a new home you are visiting as a potential buyer. What happens when you open the door? Do you see a sunlit, sparkling clean foyer while a pleasant scent wafts your way? Or do you see a dark, foreboding entrance while you wonder what that musty smell is?

Once you and your designer have decided on what you want your visitors to see when they “open the door,” you should have in place methods to measure how many visitors are encouraged to check out the rest of the “property,” and how likely they are to follow up.

While website design has the exciting benefits of applying all kinds of creative marketing techniques while endeavoring to inform, entertain, and/or promote a business concept, designers also have to discipline themselves to use a little restraint. Sometimes creativity can get in the way of simplicity, and in doing so can confuse your site’s visitors.

Let’s get back to our door and the visitor’s snap judgment about whether or not to proceed into the “house.” If the visitor is bombarded with flashing lights, a musical welcome triggered by a sound sensor, and an unusual texture underfoot, the visitor may lose sight of the home’s solid foundation and may become too distracted to give them home a chance. Don’t throw so many things at your visitor that they lose their comfort level and actually fear proceeding.

The “foundation” and basics of web design that should be kept straightforward include:

1) Global Navigation (the site’s main sections)
2) Clarity of secondary, tertiary, and quaternary navigation
3) Prominence of the company logo
4) Use of a tagline describing what your company does

There is an excellent resource available that showcases good web design, and can be a fantastic starting ground for you and your designer. (Best of all, it’s free!). Categorizing sites by style and industry, this resource is sure to give
you something to consider for your first launch of your website.

 

http://siteinspire.net/showcase/category

Even the web visitor untrained in design has a strong opinion, one that guides the choices they make of where they want to spend their web time. Visitors may choose a competitor’s site because it is more visually appealing to them, or because in their experience it “works better.” Swallow your pride and figure out what it is they are getting from your competitors’ sites, and incorporate those elements into your site.

Before incorporating new elements, however, visit your stats. The website stats are objective, and will help you if you will let them.

Finding the right mix takes patience and the willingness to truly listen to what your visitors’ behavior is telling you. But the effort will pay off with higher quality leads from your website and improved sales. Who wouldn’t want to open a door to that?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 10:13 am and is filed under In The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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