FirmBee via Pixabay
The internet is your stage, and how your website spotlights your business is more important than ever. Creating a website that shows off your team’s talents, your product selection or software is essential to your success.
A visitor to your website has an experience, called the user experience, or UX, and this is the ultimate metric in measuring your site’s effectiveness. Market research I’ve been involved with shows that an average visitor spends less than 1.3 seconds deciding if they want to stay on a website.
If they don’t like the look, feel, and/or message of your site, they “bounce”, or leave the site in an instant without visiting another page. Why do you care? Because bounce rates are recorded, along with time spent on the page, by search engines.
These factors affect the performance of your website. So even if that visitor wasn’t an ideal customer, the fact that they bailed in a hurry means that your site will be punished by search engines’ algorithms, and might not be found by authentic customers who are looking for your products or services.
Is that something you can risk because of poor UX?
How can you make sure your website’s user experience is effective? Here are a few things you should do when creating or redesigning your company’s website to make sure your UX is effective:
Create a Vision Board
This might seems a little artsy-tartsy, but trust me, even the most analytical, database, backend-driven developers will appreciate you putting together a vision board illustrating what you like.
Grab images that you find pleasing and feel represent your brand. Think of color, form, typography, artistic movement, style, and more, when putting together your vision board. Sometimes called a “mood board”, it will give you insights as to how your website will look and feel to your end user. It will also help guide your developers as they hone in on your website’s needs.
Plan Your Wireframe
How are users navigating your site? From one page to the next, how are they consuming your content and following a strategic path to a conversion? Don’t discredit this scientific methodology when measure of your UX. What people “do next”, and “where they land” is a vital part of making sure you have a website designed to drive your desired conversions.
Think of it this way, you are leading a potential lead down a funnel, and making sure they aren’t distracted or lost can make the difference in your CPA, or cost per acquisition. Have a designer or artist map out your website’s wireframe in advance of development to make sure your conversions are strategized from the beginning.
Test Your Website
Think you nailed it, huh? Your website is gorgeous, it has a bunch of clickable CTA buttons and all sorts of fabulous content. But is it converting? There is only one way to find out—test it… and then test it some more.
No matter how good of a designer you’ve hired, or how skilled they are with UX, the final results lie in how people react to your website. Run split testing to see what page designs work better than others. Measure your traffic and click through rate, or CTR, by experimenting.
My main rule—there are no bad ideas. Try it and see if it works. Test and test some more until you find the winning formula for your website.
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