Wondering why you need a great website design?
First impressions count!
15 years ago your business needed to be in a great location with lots of people passing, have a great looking shopfront that enticed people to come into your business and great layouts & staff that could convince people to buy.
Things have changed. The internet is the new high street, search engine results are the new shopfronts and websites are the new layouts and content and calls to action are the new customer service staff.
15 years ago your business needed to be in a great location with lots of people passing, have a great looking shopfront that enticed people to come into your business and great layouts & staff that could convince people to buy.
Things have changed. The internet is the new high street, search engine results are the new shopfronts and websites are the new layouts and content and calls to action are the new customer service staff.
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You need to have a great website design that encourages people to stay and have a look around.
That means your website needs to look fantastic so that people enjoy visiting it, reading it and looking at all your great images and video. This will encourage them to spend longer on it, talk about it to their friends and explore your business more. A great looking website means you’ve put effort into your appearance. That first impression is all important and a business that puts effort into their appearance is a business that will treat its customers as well as it treats itself. Great writing on your website is the foundation of building trust and interest in your possible customer and convincing them you’re the right business they’re looking for! They want to see you’re conscientious (took us a couple tries to spell that right!), great value for money, friendly, efficient, professional and all the other good stuff! Now that content takes over that role from customer service employees, it needs to say all those things. However, fantastic calls to action are what separates the businesses that get window shopped and those that get all the customers. Have you ever hired employees that made a great impression but couldn’t close their sales? Then you’d know how important calls to action are! Have you ever been on a website where you’re interested in the business but couldn’t figure out how to contact them? It’s a terrible feeling isn’t it. You feel like you’re wasting time trying to get in touch with them and you wonder why they don’t make it as easy as possible. Take a look at our homepage and you’ll see you have every opportunity to get in touch with us with anything you need. This is what separates the closers from those that don’t get any coffee! Our website design converts people into contacting us by making it easy, clear and providing tons of value. That's what yours needs to do in order to get you more customers! |
Just some of our website designs
Notice how these all have clear calls to action and engaging designs!
These websites generate tons of leads for their clients because they convert well. Want one? |
The science behind great website design
3 seconds is all you have to grab the attention of your visitor.
Everyone has habits, routines & systems. These save the mind having to use precious energy everyday by doing things automatically.
These ‘heuristics’ are what inform most of our thoughts and actions everyday. These happen subconsciously and with the amount of time people now spend on the internet, our brains have developed these for browsing websites.
We use science from the latest research to make our websites as engaging as possible.
Everyone has habits, routines & systems. These save the mind having to use precious energy everyday by doing things automatically.
These ‘heuristics’ are what inform most of our thoughts and actions everyday. These happen subconsciously and with the amount of time people now spend on the internet, our brains have developed these for browsing websites.
We use science from the latest research to make our websites as engaging as possible.
Writing
Emotions
When it comes to writing on a website, emotions that are portrayed are important.
Headlines on sites aren’t just the first thing people see, they’re also what are looked at the most. Visitors seek them out. These headlines produce emotions in visitors and they want those emotions played with. The emotions that are most shared on social media are Anger, Inspiration and Anxiety in that order. That’s because those emotions trigger the strongest response in us.
So, when it comes to writing headlines on your website, you either want to play on people’s Inspiration at how well your services can solve their problems, or their anxiety about what will happen if they don’t contact you RIGHT NOW.
Loss aversion
People are terrible at figuring out probabilities and cost vs. benefit. We focus much more time and energy on losses as opposed to gains and that makes the negatives much more painful than the positives are joyful.
When you write content for your readers you want to make sure you:
Spend more time writing on what the reader will lose out on if they don’t use your service/buy from you. You want to focus on immediate gains they’ll have. You want to list benefits of your service separately and group costs together to equalise the differences between them in the readers head. Finally you want to create scarcity and urgency - “Offer only available for a short time!”.
If people don’t buy from you now, their flooding will get worse, the costs of your service will go up and the world will end!
Readability
Your writing has to be as easy to read as possible. This isn’t about dumbing down your writing for your audience, but because reading long sentences with big words uses more brainpower. The perfect level to write at is for a 14 year old (before GCSE).
This has a large enough vocabulary to get your point across, while also making it as easy as possible to read. Even PHds prefer reading at this level as it’s easiest for the brain to get through.
Using big words makes you sound smart, but risks making your reader feel dumb. Big mistake! This is something companies like ours always have to spend time on. Some services are very technical and complex and explaining this without making the reader feel dumb is very important. If someone feels spoken down to or forced to doubt themselves, they won’t take action. The opposite of what you want!
Design
Colours
Colours are incredibly important in design. Not only do certain colours stand out to us by default, complimenting colours on a website forces someone to move their gaze.
If you have a certain colour scheme on your website, having a colour that is used only for calls-to-action and stands out and forces through 60% more clicks!
Some recent research has found that while green is the easiest colour for us to see, red stands out better for actions. This green to red change for calls-to-action has been tested to have a 34% increase in sign-ups. This could have something to do with red contrasting better than green, but not enough research has been done into this yet
What this means for you is that choosing the right colours creates a massive change to the amount of people contacting you.
Viewing habits
With the way that websites have been designed traditionally, people are now used to looking at new websites in a certain way. The top-left corner is usually looked at first, followed by the top of the site, then read down the left.
This pattern can be used in two different ways. You can follow the grain and use the normal layout of company name in top left, navigation on the top and writing on the left. This will achieve a familiar, comfortable feeling with the visitor and enable them to easily read your content and decide from there what to do.
The other way is to disrupt this pattern. Do this and you force you visitor to look at your business in a different way. This makes your company unique, stand out and be seen as more “young”. Doing this will also cause your visitor to pay closer attention to your content, but do less reading. So if your business gains more from showing images and video, this is the best design decision for your layout!
List order
When it comes to your navigation or lists in your content there are a few things to bear in mind.
A reader or viewers attention is always strongest at the beginning and end. Attention always wavers in the middle. What this means is your most important links or items should be at the beginning and end.
Normally this would be Home and Contact Us, but could also apply to times when you want to give them information on your services. Perhaps your most expensive service should be at the end of your list?
When it comes to lists, short term memory is limited. It can only hold 7 items at a time, so anymore than this should be split into groups, otherwise you’ll tire out or confuse your reader. Having 5 items on your navigation is normally the best compromise between what your viewer can handle and what you want to get across.
Social Signalling
Effort Heuristic
People will place more value on something that appears to have a great deal of effort placed into it. Some recent done recently at the University of Illinois asked 2 groups to value the same poem. The first group was told the poem took 4 hours to complete, the other group that it took 18 hours.
The 18 hour group believed the poem was of a higher quality and liked it better than the 4 hour group. More importantly, they priced it at almost twice the value of the 4 hour group. The same product, but the perception of higher effort increased the value in their eyes. Therefore, they’d spend more money!
Herd Behaviour
People naturally are social animals. We do what others do in order to fit in. This is extremely powerful when it comes to business and services. There are a few guideline that should be followed for this:
Emotions
When it comes to writing on a website, emotions that are portrayed are important.
Headlines on sites aren’t just the first thing people see, they’re also what are looked at the most. Visitors seek them out. These headlines produce emotions in visitors and they want those emotions played with. The emotions that are most shared on social media are Anger, Inspiration and Anxiety in that order. That’s because those emotions trigger the strongest response in us.
So, when it comes to writing headlines on your website, you either want to play on people’s Inspiration at how well your services can solve their problems, or their anxiety about what will happen if they don’t contact you RIGHT NOW.
Loss aversion
People are terrible at figuring out probabilities and cost vs. benefit. We focus much more time and energy on losses as opposed to gains and that makes the negatives much more painful than the positives are joyful.
When you write content for your readers you want to make sure you:
Spend more time writing on what the reader will lose out on if they don’t use your service/buy from you. You want to focus on immediate gains they’ll have. You want to list benefits of your service separately and group costs together to equalise the differences between them in the readers head. Finally you want to create scarcity and urgency - “Offer only available for a short time!”.
If people don’t buy from you now, their flooding will get worse, the costs of your service will go up and the world will end!
Readability
Your writing has to be as easy to read as possible. This isn’t about dumbing down your writing for your audience, but because reading long sentences with big words uses more brainpower. The perfect level to write at is for a 14 year old (before GCSE).
This has a large enough vocabulary to get your point across, while also making it as easy as possible to read. Even PHds prefer reading at this level as it’s easiest for the brain to get through.
Using big words makes you sound smart, but risks making your reader feel dumb. Big mistake! This is something companies like ours always have to spend time on. Some services are very technical and complex and explaining this without making the reader feel dumb is very important. If someone feels spoken down to or forced to doubt themselves, they won’t take action. The opposite of what you want!
Design
Colours
Colours are incredibly important in design. Not only do certain colours stand out to us by default, complimenting colours on a website forces someone to move their gaze.
If you have a certain colour scheme on your website, having a colour that is used only for calls-to-action and stands out and forces through 60% more clicks!
Some recent research has found that while green is the easiest colour for us to see, red stands out better for actions. This green to red change for calls-to-action has been tested to have a 34% increase in sign-ups. This could have something to do with red contrasting better than green, but not enough research has been done into this yet
What this means for you is that choosing the right colours creates a massive change to the amount of people contacting you.
Viewing habits
With the way that websites have been designed traditionally, people are now used to looking at new websites in a certain way. The top-left corner is usually looked at first, followed by the top of the site, then read down the left.
This pattern can be used in two different ways. You can follow the grain and use the normal layout of company name in top left, navigation on the top and writing on the left. This will achieve a familiar, comfortable feeling with the visitor and enable them to easily read your content and decide from there what to do.
The other way is to disrupt this pattern. Do this and you force you visitor to look at your business in a different way. This makes your company unique, stand out and be seen as more “young”. Doing this will also cause your visitor to pay closer attention to your content, but do less reading. So if your business gains more from showing images and video, this is the best design decision for your layout!
List order
When it comes to your navigation or lists in your content there are a few things to bear in mind.
A reader or viewers attention is always strongest at the beginning and end. Attention always wavers in the middle. What this means is your most important links or items should be at the beginning and end.
Normally this would be Home and Contact Us, but could also apply to times when you want to give them information on your services. Perhaps your most expensive service should be at the end of your list?
When it comes to lists, short term memory is limited. It can only hold 7 items at a time, so anymore than this should be split into groups, otherwise you’ll tire out or confuse your reader. Having 5 items on your navigation is normally the best compromise between what your viewer can handle and what you want to get across.
Social Signalling
Effort Heuristic
People will place more value on something that appears to have a great deal of effort placed into it. Some recent done recently at the University of Illinois asked 2 groups to value the same poem. The first group was told the poem took 4 hours to complete, the other group that it took 18 hours.
The 18 hour group believed the poem was of a higher quality and liked it better than the 4 hour group. More importantly, they priced it at almost twice the value of the 4 hour group. The same product, but the perception of higher effort increased the value in their eyes. Therefore, they’d spend more money!
Herd Behaviour
People naturally are social animals. We do what others do in order to fit in. This is extremely powerful when it comes to business and services. There are a few guideline that should be followed for this:
- Put testimonials, reviews and endorsements from customers and influencers on your site. This is one of the most powerful things you can do as a business. It shows visitors that others have loved using your service and that helps build trust.
- Make using your service sound like the norm. If someone chooses not to use your service then they are doing something few others do. This will deter them from not using your service as they’ll feel like an outsider if they take this route.
- Display social media widgets loud and proud. Even if you haven’t got many followers yet, just having these viewable has been proven to increase engagement. It shows that you’re confident enough that people enjoy spending time with your service and want to tell others about it.
- Awards, “as seen on”, association memberships etc. are great. These display that others are also talking about how great your company is, and they can go to those references to get a second opinion on your business.
- Photos of people are better than photos of things. In studies, it’s been shown that exchanging photos of a product for photos of people has increased engagement by more than 50%. One theory is that people engage emotionally when they see another human being and the brain can’t tell the difference between in-person and an image.
