It’s not easy creating a website design that works, it’s really not. Did you know that when a visitor (or better, a potential client) comes to your website, you have just seconds to grab their attention? Human attention span is pretty short, somewhere around 6-8 seconds, which is not much longer than a goldfish attention span. Your website has a lot of work to do in a very short amount of time. Here are a couple of ways you can improve your website design.

1. Make sure you grab the visitors attention:

The website visitor should be able to figure out what your page is about right away. As I mentioned, you have a very short amount of time to grab their attention and keep them on the site. You could do this with an eye-caching logo, a tagline that tells the visitor what you can do for them, and/or website copy.

There is a saying in marketing: if you confuse, you lose. So be sure you deliver that crucial information to the visitor.

This is an example of a tagline:

improve-website-design-tagline

There is no doubt what she does and how she will help. Focus on who your ideal customer is and write content that will get their attention.

The more specific and personalized your messaging is to your target audience, the more compelling your marketing is.

2. Call to action (CTA):

Once your visitor has an idea of what your site is about, it’s time for the good old call-to-action. The CTA can have a large impact on conversions since it is the point of decision for the customer.  I found that a lot of websites don’t even have a CTA or they do it wrong by making it too vague and too passive. A CTA should encourage users to take an action, so don’t use words like: “View”, “Buy”, “Get started”. Those examples are not compelling enough for the visitor to take action.What you should do instead is to use words like: “JOIN NOW!”, “CONTACT ME”, “BOOK A FREE CONSULTATION”, “SIGN UP FOR FREE”, … You should also have a main CTA that you focus on. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use CTAs on different parts of the page, it means that you should make a main one that users just MUST engage with, some smaller CTAs here and there just so that the visitors know exactly what they must do to take the next step to buy from you.

3. Allow White Space

White space is a key element of good website design. This is not referring to the color, but the margin/empty space (also called negative space) around some content. Having some white space around your content can really help your text to stand out on the page. Take Google for example, you see the search bar right away, because there is a lot of white space or margin around it and because of that it really stands out. According to the conversion tool Crazy Egg, padding text and titles with white space increases user attention by 20%. The white space makes your website feel open, easy to navigate, easy to use and it improves readability. Those are one of the most important things. One of the places you should implement this is the top of your page, the part that is visible before you scroll down. You should identify what information is most important for your visitor and make it stand out. One good example for a page that uses white space to grab your attention is apple, check it out:

white-space-apple
You know what the page is about in an instant.

4. Improve Page Speed

Users are impatient, that is a FACT. So when it comes to page loading speed, every second counts. Pages that take 1-2 seconds to load will have greatest conversions, but if it takes longer than 2 seconds bounce rates can increase by 103 percent according to a study led by Akamai. Mobile usage increases day by day and it enables users to access content from anywhere, so it’s very important that you have a fast-loading web page, otherwise users will typically bounce.

You can check your page speed and troubleshoot any issues with one of these tools:

They are all good and can provide some important insight so that you can troubleshoot your web page.

5. Stay Consistent

What I mean by that is that you should use ONE style throughout your website. If you create a unified style, users will more likely spend time on your page. As they navigate your website, having a unified style will make them know that they are still on the same website. Any inconsistency, changes in your style can confuse them and make them leave. So be sure that elements look the same across your website. This includes:

  • Fonts
  • Colors
  • Button shape
  • Button sizes
  • Spacing

Take some time and improve your website design, it can really make a difference

This is it for this article. Stick around and check out my other articles.