As of the beginning of this year, there were over 759 million websites, and 103 million of those websites were added in 2013 alone.
You have a lot of competition online, and if your website isn’t designed well—if it isn’t easy to navigate or visually stimulating—it becomes hard to compete.
Here are three reasons why your sales are being affected by a poorly designed site.
User Experience Suffers
Your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for customers to find what they want and make a purchase. The more hoops they have to jump through, the better chance you’ll lose them at some point in the sales funnel.
If your site is difficult to navigate, you’re losing sales. Period.
Unless customers are extremely loyal, they won’t hesitate to leave if it is taking too many clicks to get what they want. Because you’re competing with so many other sites, user experience is a critical factor in keeping users interested.
So Does SEO
If users are having a hard time navigating your site, if they don’t really like it, then search engines aren’t going to like it either. Google definitely takes into account user experience when determining rankings.
Additionally, some of your content might not bet getting indexed because search engine spiders can’t find it, especially if it is hidden in JavaScript or Flash files. Good navigation makes your site crawlable, and your site needs to be crawlable for Google to notice your content.
And You Might Just Bore People To Death
Technical elements like SEO aside, your site needs to be attractive. It still needs to be eye-catching.
We just discussed the other day how to capture a client’s attention. Here are a few elements of a well-designed homepage that also need to be considered:
- Color scheme
- Creative header (what does it say about your brand?)
- Focused content (can readers clearly understand what you’re all about?)
- Mystery (don’t give away your secrets on the first page—entice readers to click for more!)
Having a visually appealing, easy-to-navigate site is critical when there are millions of sites competing for the attention of consumers.
What site design tips do you have?