Anyone who wants to do business on the global platform of the WWW needs a successful website. Design plays a key role in the success or failure of a website. A site that’s clearly laid out, has a strong call to action and encourages the visitor to interact on a personal basis presents an effective ‘shop window’ for any online business. But how can website design encourage your visitors to do more than just press their noses against your virtual windows and actually step inside the website and start buying?

Making your website design appealing

Research by a Canadian university has concluded that we make up our minds about the visual appeal of a website in just 50 milliseconds. The research, published in the journal ‘Behaviour and Information Technology’, was conducted by Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and concluded that the old adage of ‘first impressions count’ was applicable to web design. So it’s clear that to make a website a powerful marketing tool for your business, you really do have to make a good first impression.

Giving the public what they want?

The first consideration before you put electronic pen to graphic’s tablet is what you want your website to achieve. If you’re creating an ecommerce website then that end goal is clear – driving customers towards your checkout with a shopping cart full of products and their credit card details. Structure is all-important in turning as many clicks into cash sales as possible and is an essential ingredient in website design. Structure needs to develop into a roadmap that lays out the contents of the site in a clearly defined pattern that’s easy for the visitor to follow. While you may be using good website design to encourage your visitors into the site, its actual role is to persuade that visitor to do what you want them to do, namely answer your call to action.

Image-conscious…

For years, search engine relied on the inclusion of keywords to allow their algorithms to select sites for listings. While keywords are still an integral part of SEO, good website design is now an SEO concept too. The most recent Google algorithms allow the search engine ‘bots to list pages not just on the quality and relevance of their written content but also on any images included. So rather than going for generic pictures that may look pretty but have absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the site’s subject matter, smart website design now incorporates images into its SEO planning. It also gives human visitors affirmation that your site is relevant to the search term they’ve used to find you, and all within that 50 millisecond window of opportunity.

SEO by design, not by accident…

For several years, search engine optimisation was considered to be a completely separate animal from website design. But times have moved on and today’s web designers have to factor in the relevance of SEO into their creative musings. We’ve already mentioned the use of images as SEO tools, but to build up the traffic flow towards any website that site has to make an appearance on page one of Google. 90% of browsers click on the first Google listing. Anyone who isn’t on page one is losing out on a potentially huge section of the market. So the SEO has to be embedded into the very heart of the website and that means factoring in its importance at the design stage.

So as you can see, designing a website isn’t just a matter of sticking a couple of random pictures up, typing in some text with a few keywords included and then hoping the search engines take pity on you. Good website design is a complex, multi-layered fusion of form, function and good ‘eye-candy’ that grabs your customers and pulls them through the virtual doors. If you’re not sure how to do that then talk to an expert who can help get the visitors flowing in the right direction – towards your site.