Whether you obtain traffic to your website through Natural Search or Pay Per Click, it is imperative that the ratio of unique visitors to conversions (sales) is high on your list of key stats. A recent article we have been reading on Entrepreneur.com highlights the big difference between a well-designed website and a great-looking one!
A well-designed site is one that sells! It leads visitors through the sales process without getting in their way. If it’s pretty on top of that, fine.
What you want your design to do is entice people to stay on your site when they get there, draw them into your message and make it easy for them to keep reading so they can make a buying decision. However, many sites do just the opposite. Below are the Seven Deadly Sins which could be killing your conversion rates:
Website design sin #1: Slow-loading pages and graphics
Count out three seconds. In web time, it feels like forever! If your home page takes that long to load, you’ve got trouble on your hands. Web users are extremely impatient people. If they can’t begin reading or viewing your page right away, they’re going to leave and go to another, more user-friendly site.
If you absolutely must use large graphics on your homepage, provide a small icon that links to the larger graphic and warn people they may have to wait as it loads. Here are a few things you can do to speed up your loading time:
Reduce the file size of the graphics on your page. Specify the dimensions of your graphics files in your HTML code. Substitute coloured text for a graphics file whenever possible.
Website design sin #2: No eye-catching headline to grab your visitors’ attention
Now you have to capture your visitors’ attention right away and convince them your site has exactly what they’re looking for. The best way to do that is with a well-formatted, attention-grabbing headline that’s packed with intriguing benefits and compels them to read further.
Website design sin #3: Distracting banners and links
On your site, don’t put up banners or links that send people to someone else’s site (and that includes Google AdWords ads). Everything on your site should directly relate to its ultimate purpose – whether it’s to get more opt-ins for your e-mail list or to sell your product. Anything on your site that doesn’t serve this main purpose should be immediately deleted.
Of course, if the purpose of your site is purely to promote affiliate products or sell advertising space, then obviously you’ll want to include banners or links. But if you try to promote affiliate products on a page that’s also meant to sell a specific product, you’ll end up doing a lousy job of both.
Website design sin #4: Too many dizzying colours or fonts
Nothing screams “amateur!” louder than a dizzying mishmash of different fonts and colours. To make your site look professional, use a basic colour scheme with two or three colours and a couple of fonts. Look at any well-designed site and you’ll see that it’s pretty conservative with the colours and fonts it uses.
Website design sin #5: Patterned backgrounds
Make sure your background stays in the background! If you add textures or use dark backgrounds on your site, people won’t be able to read your copy easily. And if you aren’t making it easy for them to read your copy, you aren’t making it easy for them to buy your product.
Tests have shown over and over again that the sites with black text on a plain white background – with colours limited to the margins – get the highest conversion rates. It might seem boring from a design perspective, but better sales are pretty exciting from an income perspective.
Website design sin #6: Too many distracting graphics, animations, or video clips
Here’s another amateur mistake: thinking that lots of images, fancy graphics, animated gifs or video clips will make your site more interesting. Unless those visual elements help persuade people to buy your product by showing visitors what your product looks like, or demonstrating how it works, they’re useless decorations that will distract your visitors and prevent them from following through on what you want them to do.
Website design sin #7: Huge blocks of text that are nearly impossible to read
What happens when you run into a giant block of text on a website? Do you read it, scan it or skip over it to something shorter?
If you want your visitors to read all the way to your “order” button, make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Limit your paragraphs to six lines. And make sure you vary your paragraph lengths so they don’t all look the same. A choppy paragraph structure makes online text much easier to read.
