Everyone loves a pretty website. Animating elements, tantalising hover effects, full screen images and videos – they look great. BUT do they actually help your website achieve what it needs to achieve? To make it profitable in whatever currency you’re looking for, whether it be visits, signups, sales etc. I wanted to share some recent stats from projects we’ve worked on and take you a bit deeper into what we actually do when designing your site.
Every project is different. The clients we work with come to us for bespoke web design, something they need personally for their brand and vision. Because our builds are all bespoke we have a lot of challenges when it comes to design. To make sure we always get it right we concentrate on one thing – what is this site/page/section/title/button actually for? That is the most important factor. It still has to look awesome of course but sometimes functionality has to play a bigger role than making something look pretty.
One day we’ll design an award winning site (possibly). You know the ones, with huge interactivity that takes you on an amazing user journey and you find yourself visiting the site again and again just to take part in the site itself, to be a part of the experience. Our clients have goals they need to achieve with their projects and its our job to make sure that the site we build achieves those goals (unfortunately no ones goal yet has been to win a design award!).
Below are some stats from projects we’ve recently worked on, with results between 4-8 weeks after launch. I’ll take you through a few of them after…
Bounce rate down from 89% to 23%
This was a huge win for us and the client involved. In case you’re wondering what a bounce rate is – “the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.” This particular case was a client using a template from a well known ‘DIY’ website building company. Whatever page users landed on from whatever source 9/10 of them didn’t look at any other page. That is shocking and to be fair was an easy one to fix although getting it to 23% was above expectations for sure (41-55% is average).
So how did we do it?
In a nutshell – clean, simple navigation, reduce page lengths, more mouse interactivity on buttons and elements (like nice hover effects). We made the site more inviting, easier to move on to the next page and take the user on a journey, giving them options to carry on but presenting relevant links and buttons where needed so they actually wanted to keep browsing.
Bookings made from the site of course increased as a result of the extra browsing too.
Mobile Sessions up by 93%
Depending on your source, mobile traffic accounts for nearly 60% of the internet right now. If your site doesn’t perform well on all screen sizes not only will Google negatively affect your rankings but users will stay well clear of you too. We build fully responsive websites so they adjust and reflow on all screen sizes from the smallest mobile to a 50″ TV screen.
So how did we do it?
This specific stat was a pure case of going from a static, non-mobile friendly site to responsive one. If your site is not responsive then you need to make that change… now. It doesn’t have to be a huge redesign. Sometimes we can work with what you have to make the site mobile friendly.
Users up by 30%
So, this is the big one. This particular site had an increase in 30% of users visiting the site 6 weeks after we relaunched. Think about that. These new users don’t know what the site looks like, the design played no part in them visiting. If you have a good looking site that also performs well, your traffic will increase. Google will start to raise your rankings, people will happily share your content around social media more, you’ll probably want to promote the site yourself more now that you’re no longer ashamed of it!!
So how did we do it?
This is the summary really. We made a great looking site. But the basis of the site always had a goal… to get as many people to buy into the site and book. We gave the site a great feel, giving off the right vibes that users would be looking for. Then with very careful planning guided those users through a journey that they not only enjoyed but pretty much always ended up where we wanted them to go. Giving your users enough freedom and information to get what they need from the site whilst making sure they saw what we needed them to so that they will (hopefully) one day be a customer.
Combine that with a responsive design and increase in mobile traffic. Better sharing features, full browser checks so everyone has a great experience, SEO built in from the ground up and a whole lot of attention and love.
Being pretty just is not enough
We have discussions every week with clients trying to over design elements on their page, or wanting to copy their rivals sites. The bottom line is –
What are you trying to achieve with your website? We’ll help you achieve it, and make it pretty.
