Website design should take more than form into consideration—it should also address function! This article discusses a few of the issues that may be keeping your site from performing.
You’ve been here before. Today is the day of the big client meeting and you just got off the phone with a crucial member of your team—feeling sick, can’t work. I think as business owners we have all experienced something similar. What to do?
Do you reschedule the meeting at the last minute? Try to get through it without your ailing team member? It looks to be unsteady ground along each path.
If only you could have foreseen this happening, you might have driven them to the doctor yourself before the symptoms got too severe.
How is it any different when your website doesn’t function as it should? When your site is not healthy enough to do its job, it could mean lost revenue.
Here are a few symptoms you should be on the lookout for if you want your site to be as healthy as possible.
Slow Load Times
If your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you could be hemorrhaging visitors, a fatal mistake for many businesses. Your website design and maintenance strategy needs to address slow load times for two reasons. First, because when a visitor clicks on your site, a slow site can make them click away. Second, slow load times hurt your rankings with Google and other search engines.
Poor User Interaction
Your site is meant to be used. If visitors are not clicking on anything, something is wrong. If you have engaging written content, effective calls to action, and informative and entertaining video content, you should be seeing results.
Psychological Phenomena
The psychology of marketing extends to your website. For instance, if your site has any design elements that look like a banner advertisement, you need to take note of the banner blindness phenomenon.
What is banner blindness? According to Hubspot, it is “a form of selective attention, in which web visitors ignore information presented in banners.” The reason behind this phenomenon is that we as technology users have become accustomed to scrolling past advertisements, which often take the form of a banner.
Visitors know what they want, so they usually won’t waste their time on ads (or anything that looks like an ad). Design accordingly.
Design Inconsistencies
So far, I have covered mostly website design issues that affect the function of a site. However, form is also important! The way a site looks can attract and repel visitors, so it is important to be consistent in your design decisions.
Be deliberate with your use of fonts, color schemes, and site layout. A website that looks too mix-and-match can scare away prospects.
Talk to Us about Our Website Design Services
When your website is not able to do its job, it can feel like you have a team member out with the flu. If you want your website to be functional as well as good-looking, you may need to talk to someone with a proven strategy to nurse it back to health. I like to think of myself as a web doctor of sorts, each person on my ZenChange team a specialist.
Ready to give your website the healthy life it deserves? Get in touch with the web doctor today! Let’s schedule a consultation to see if we are a good fit.