When you have guests visiting your home, you want them to be as comfortable as possible – it’s only natural to make an effort to welcome them and give them the right impression of your abode. Well, the same is true with your website. Your website is your business’ digital home, after all, and when you have visitors, you also take great pains to ensure that they enjoy their visit – and perhaps stay longer. But you only have mere seconds to retain the attention of visitors, and more often than not, it’s what they see in the first few seconds that will make an impact. If you are planning to improve and revamp your website, here are the top ways you can do so.
- Create a value proposition
One of the initial things you can do is create a value proposition. In other words, show visitors right away what benefits they can get if they hire you, buy your products, enlist your service, and so on. Your value proposition works best on your home page and as a headline as well. But you can also place it on your ‘About Us’ page or your blog page.
- Pay attention to the different aspects of navigation
Your website’s navigation will have two basic purposes – it will help your visitors find what they need to find, and it will also help you with your ranking in search engines. It follows that you should prioritise your visitors’ needs and the needs of search engines only afterwards. When it comes to navigation, it’s better to use descriptive words – words that your visitors will use and will search with, for instance. Avoid the use of internal language or jargon, and try to be personal rather than generic.
- Remember the power of calls to action
Calls to action are a big deal. Once you already have visitors, this means they are interested – so what should you do next? Encourage them to act, as confirmed by experienced web design Oxford specialists like Xist2. Install buttons with calls to action throughout your site with words and lines like Download, Get a quote, Go to checkout, Register or Sign up, and so on. Calls to action will always start with a verb, and it won’t be a call to action otherwise.
Here’s another thing: when you are creating your call to action buttons, find contrasting or accent colours. For instance, if you have a website that is mostly blue, then look for a nice warm colour such as orange or yellow. If you give visitors a better idea of what they can do or click on (and what happens when they do it or click on it), then they will tend to follow.
- Be creative with your testimonials
Almost every website will have testimonials, and some even have a dedicated testimonials page. But let’s be honest: who really has time to look through your customer reviews and testimonials? Have you ever done it? Exactly.
Testimonials can be quite useful, but if you want them to be more effective, find a way to scatter them throughout your website. When you scatter these testimonials throughout your site, there’s a better chance for visitors to view and see them, especially if you intersperse video testimonials with text and if you include them in your product pages as well.
Image attributed to Pixabay.com