Designing a Website for Ease of Use, Some Tips

Whenever you are creating a new website, design and ease of use are essential. If the design is not functional and not easy enough to use, visitors will become easily impatient and will be discouraged from returning to your website. Here are a few Salt Lake City web design tips for making a website that is both attractive and simple to use.

1. Use different colors. You can use colors to highlight certain sections of your website, like your navigation bar or any other page with specific information. A bold red or blue color, for example, will quickly compel a viewer’s eye. Choose appropriate colors that are not brash and unprofessional, and think about harmony. Over-using colors that are non-complementary will not create a pleasant viewing experience and can drive visitors away.
2. Concentrate your design on the goal. An effective Utah web design will be complementary to the basic goals of the site. If the purpose of the site is to provide information, then your design should emphasize content matter and ease of navigation. If the purpose of the site is to sell a product, then your design should highlight product displays and make searching for products as simple as possible. Think about function; if, for example, your checkout process is particularly complicated, your prospective buyer may get frustrated and simply abandon the purchase. Designing your website with the right marketing features will help generate traffic and may increase your overall return on investment (ROI).
3. Use a consistent design theme. A website with two much going on, with formatting and design style that changes from page to page, will look unprofessional and surely turn visitors away. Choose a consistent design across your website, no matter how little pages it may have. If your website does require different design elements, then think about how you can tie those elements together, so that there is still a commonality. A header or sidebar that remains the same on each page, for example, can help to make transitions between pages smoother. To avoid your visitors from having a discordant experience on your website, make transitions as smooth as possible.
4. Choose simple buttons and links. Website buttons that are too big, flashing, strangely colored or oddly positioned can make for a very unpleasant user experience. Links that are much too long or multiple links that are side by side can be very distracting and confusing. Select simple button designs that are not too alternative or unusual, and limit linking to one or two words rather than an entire line or string of words.
5. Provide a sitemap. A sitemap can be particularly useful, especially if the site is large with many pages. A sitemap provides new visitors with a straightforward snapshot view of all the pages and sections of your site, much like an index. Even familiar visitors to your website can benefit from a sitemap, allowing them to quickly notice new pages and sections of the site.
6. Make sections of your site easily accessible. Make the links and pages on your website as clean and organized as possible. With a format that does not cause confusion, the sections of your site will be easier to access. On each page, keep a header, footer, or sidebar that always has the same links that lead to the main pages of your site, such as the home page or contact page. This format helps to make accessing your information clear and simple.

Designing a website that is both appealing and simple to use can be a challenge, but the outcomes are well worth the work you put in. With a useful SLC web design, you will generate more traffic, a higher ROI, and reap greater benefits from your marketing campaigns.

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Redesigning your Website for Marketability: 25 Things to Think About

I found some notes some time ago about things to consider if you want to effectively re-design a website so that it lasts you a long time. The contents of the list are mainly online marketing subject matter, rather than actual Utah web design information. They deal primarily with Utah SEO and persuasion architecture. Take a look:

1. Emphasize significance of the service or product from the multiple viewpoints of the client.
2. Concentrate on emotional appeal.
3. Concentrate on the end-benefits for all targeted customers.
4. Consider the real needs and wants of the client.
5. Effectively answer the question: “Why should I buy from you?”
6. If there are other options, spend time addressing them.
7. Point out the difference between your product and company and other products and companies.
8. Clarify the steps a client needs to take to purchase the product or service.
9. Provide the information the customer needs to know before they make a purchase.
10. Communicate to establish a basis of trust with customers.
11. Clearly demarcate points-of-action.
12. Embed relevant keyword links.
13. Highlight “hidden area” – which is information clients have a hard time finding somewhere else.
14. Answer the questions: How? Why? Who? What?
15. Maintain relevance to clients’ needs, values, and beliefs.
16. Use personal language in copywriting; evoke feelings by using “you” not objective language.
17. Appeal to emotions to establish a sense of confidence.
18. Use headings, quotes, links, and bullet lists to make scanning simpler.
19. Define your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) clearly and strongly on the Homepage.

Generating Leads

20. Your potential client’s time is valuable. Keep clients’ attention by communicating in their own words how you can help their business.
21. Questions that prospective customers have:
1. What can this service offer my company?
2. Why do we need this service?
3. Are there better companies out there?
4. How do I know that their solutions will work?
5. Is the company trustworthy and reliable?
6. Can we afford the company’s services?
22. Maintain positivity. Don’t focus on negative pain points. Instead, spur the client to think about what they want to accomplish.
23. Use tools like “messagemaker” to automate lead generation based on lead actions and behaviors.
24. Be persuasive by using stories and case studies to elucidate your points to your leads.
25. Enhance your ability to secure a sale:
1. Strategize your marketing plan, and formulate messages for each level of your plan, from the customer’s awareness of your service, through consideration, to actual purchase of your service.
2. Identify weak areas in the sale process where you are losing valuable prospects.
3. Spend more face-to-face time with customers.
4. Track successful marketing leads.

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Optimizing with Google Analytics

Social media marketing is becoming more and more a standard practice in internet marketing. It continues to be one of the most popular forms of Utah SEO. Yet it can be difficult to find out whether your marketing strategies with social media are indeed working or not. One way to measure the progress of your social media campaign is to refine Google Analytics so that it will track traffic in response to your specific campaigns. In other words, setting up campaign filters in Google Analytics will give you feedback about whether or not your social media marketing strategies are working.

Setting up social campaign filters in Google Analytics is easy. Follow these simple steps:

1. On your main Google Analytics login page, click the ‘Edit’ link located to the right of your listed website profile.
2. In the ‘Filters Applied to Profile’ section on the next screen, click the ‘Add Filter’ link to the far right.
3. Choose an identifiable name for your filter, like ‘Social Media Grouping’.
4. Select ‘Custom filter’, for “Filter Type.”
5. From the list of radio button options, select ‘Advanced.’
6. In ‘Field A -> Extract A,’ select ‘Campaign Source’ and type the name of the social media sites you want to keep track of in the text box.*
7. In ‘Output To -> Constructor,’ select ‘Campaign Medium’ or ‘Campaign Name’ and type ‘social’ in the text box.**
8. Leave the remaining ‘yes/no’ buttons as they are and then click ‘Save Changes’ at the bottom of the screen.
9. You will begin to see the results of your filter tracking after 24 hours.

* To add some of the most popular social sites to your filter, just copy-paste the following: twitter.com|facebook.com|myspace.com|flickr.com|linkedin.com|wordpress.com|blogspot.com|youtube.com|stumbleupon.com

** There is one disadvantage to designating ‘Campaign Medium’ as ‘social’ (which changes it from ‘referral’). You will not see the referring website traffic URLs coming from your tagged social media marketing websites. The alternative to this is to mark the ‘Campaign Name’ as social (instead of marking the ‘Campaign Medium’ as ‘social’). Then, to see your social traffic, go to your profile report page -> ‘traffic sources’ -> ‘referring sites’ -> select a site -> and then filter by ‘campaign name’ to see your social traffic.

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