“We spent $15k to redo our web presence in Q1, but we haven’t seen an increase in sales?”
I just heard those words the other day when sitting with a potential client. They looked saddened, frustrated, and flat-out confused. I wanted to tell them that it was easily fixable. That thought a few small edits, we could instantly turn their $15k investment into a money maker. They have an awesome product, but turns out, they also happened to hire a web agency that failed to tell them the most important words they needed to hear…
Just because a website is beautifully designed doesn’t mean it will convert.
It doesn’t matter if you are a service or product-based business. What matters is that you can sell what you do or the product you make. $5 or $5,000, the endgame is the same.
Introduce. Educate. Sell.
But many modern website agencies forget about that when going through the process with businesses. They don’t tell the truth when it comes to what matters. You’ll have long conversations about the elegance of the top banner, the fluidity of your font choices, and the size of photos used throughout the site. But what should be talked about is…
70% of web traffic is coming from mobile devices, but companies still tend to put focus on building “desktop” focused sites…
Customers on average give about 8 to 15 seconds of their attention to the above the fold content on a website before making the choice to stay or move on…
85% of adults think that a company’s website, when viewed on a mobile device, should be as good or better than its desktop website…
88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience
It’s a priority to make a website that sells. So how do you do it?
Make mobile design the focus.
It all starts here. Your content above the fold should be strong, easy to interact with, and fun. Yes, fun. Customers love to feel like they are using a site that is interactive and built to cherish their attention, so do that. Communicate the content necessary and nothing more. Make sure that someone doesn’t have to scroll for miles and miles to find what they’re looking for.
Rewrite your language
How you speak to your customer on your website matters. Does someone pay attention to your color scheme, fonts, and images? Absolutely. But as long as you’re using a grounded visual guide to help make this work, what comes next is language. Talk to your customers in a way they can understand. So many brands speak to their audience as if they understand everything they say, and the chances are, the audience doesn’t.
Use analytics and heatmaps to adapt.
Use Google Analytics + HotJar…a lot. It can be easy to launch a site and just wait for sales or consulting calls to roll in…but that’s just not the smart way to go about it. Make sure you’re paying attention to bounce rate, what pages your audience is visiting, and then install heatmaps to observe where your content is making an impact. This helps give you proper information in order to adjust your layout, change out content, and improve the experience.
Ask for feedback.
Build relationships with ten people that you know will give you healthy feedback. These need to be people that might be interested in what you do/what you sell, but don’t otherwise have an existing connection to your brand. Ask them for brutal feedback about your site. What they enjoy, what makes sense, what doesn’t seem to work, and what they would need to see in order for it to be a better experience when first visiting your site.
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Too often, it can be easy to get off track when entering the website design process. Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions and get clarification as the process begins. If you’re paying to build a site, you should be building a site that actually works and works well.
“Your website is the center of your digital eco-system, like a brick and mortar location, the experience matters once a customer enters, just as much as the perception they have of you before they walk through the door.” ― Leland Dieno
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Below you’ll find a few examples of incredibly well-designed sites…on both mobile + desktop.
