Your next focus should be getting the traffic visiting your website to stay on your website. Depending on the industry, most websites have a 30-60% bounce rate on average. This means a large group of the web traffic entering your website leaves without navigating to any other pages, and many times they may never come back. Bugger!

Here is some information to consider to improve the user experience on your website.

A Good First Impression

Your website represents who you are and what your offering. When a potential customer comes to your website for the first time they are going to be thinking about:

• Credibility
• Trustworthy
• Professional Company
• Stable Company
• Making the potential customer feel welcome
• Am I in the correct place?

All these questions need to be answered when designing your website. Often time is taken to emphasis on how the website looks instead of how the site works, which does play an important role in making a good first impression, and first impressions count!

Tips for website design/redesign:

• Proper use of colors
• Animations, gadgets and media
• Layout
• Typography

Consistent Layout and Structure

It’s best to keep elements on your site fairly consistent from page-to-page. Elements include colors, sizes, layout, and placement of elements. This means colors are primarily the same as well as fonts and layout structure. Navigation should remain in the same location of your layout throughout your website.

For layout structure, typically three page layouts exist for most websites

• one for the homepage,
• one for content pages,
• and one for form pages.

For example, your homepage will have a different layout than a landing page for a PPC campaign (Pay Per Click). Keep the elements in these layouts constant to prevent your visitors from feeling lost.

Compelling Images

Images can be a powerful element to any website but you need to use them wisely. For example, consider stock photography. Stock images are seen everywhere because they are easily accessible and inexpensive. But are they good to use?

Marketing Experiments performed a test comparing the use of stock photography versus real imagery on a website and each of their effects on lead generation. What they found was that photos of real people out-performed the stock photos by 95%. Why? Because stock images tend to be irrelevant.

As a result, take care to place meaningful images on your site. Every image is transmitting a subconscious message to your audience, and sometimes the result is different from what you might expect.

Clear Navigation

Perhaps one of the biggest factors to keep potential customers on your website is having a good, solid navigation system that supports all search preferences. If people can’t find what they are looking for, they will give up and exit your website. Important factors in a websites navigation include:

• Keep the structure of your primary navigation simple (and near the top of your page).
• Include navigation in the footer of your site.
• Use breadcrumbs on every page (except for the homepage) so people are aware of their navigation trail.
• Include a search box near the top of your site so visitors can search by keywords.
• Don’t offer too many navigation options on a page.
• Try to keep your navigation to no more than three levels deep.
• Include links to other pages on your website within your page copy, and optimize each link’s anchor text.

The overall rule for navigation is simple: don’t require visitors to have to think too much.

Accessibility and Responsiveness

Potential customers are using the internet from their phones and tablets more than ever before, so make sure to get some of those views by allowing everyone to view your website no matter what browser or device they are using.

A quick load time is another factor to consider. 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Don’t send potential customers away before they’ve even had the chance to see what you offer!

Happy to help.

If you need help with your website contact us on 02 8011 3737 or email hello@chevrontechnologies.com.au and setup a time to connect you with technology today. We are your local Website Support and Development business in the Campbelltown & Macarthur region.