In digital marketing, attracting website visitors is only half the ballgame. You also must provide a great brand user experience that holds peoples’ attention. Web design flaws, such as poor navigation or slow loading speed, hurt your site’s performance. If your website is suffering from a high bounce rate, our seven design tips will help you recognize and address these issues.
7 Tips for Better Brand User Experience
Did you know the average website bounce rate is roughly 41 to 55 percent? This translates into money spent on pay per click advertising that goes right down the drain. However, if you use these tips to enhance brand user experience, you will likely see this important marketing metric rise steadily.
1) Flow
If you are designing or redesigning a website, you must create a brand user experience that is both natural and fluid. People today expect to be able to move seamlessly from one section to another.
Since most visitors look first at the top of the page first, it helps to structure your information in order of importance. As users scroll through your site, it’s important to direct them to other web content.
This strategy can increase the average time spent on your website. The longer visitors stick around, the higher your marketing conversion rates will likely become.
2) Navigation
Although content is king, it needs to be able to be easily navigated in order to show its greatness to the world. Older websites often lose visitors, because they create a slower, more frustrating user experience.
Poor performing websites often don’t do these five things:
- Place the navigation menu in a place where it can be easily seen
- Write descriptive, clear headings
- Create a consistent design
- Build a sticky navigation
- Avoid drop down menus
3) White Space
Today, web surfers have more options than ever. As a result, they aren’t likely to remain on your page if it’s cluttered with extraneous information.
The answer to this problem is to leave white space around graphics, photos and text where nothing at all appears. This design tactic helps to make your focal points stand out.
4) Readability
Improving the readability of your site is another effective way to keep visitors engaged. If you can persuade a visitor to keep reading, it’s more likely they will have the opportunity to see your calls-to-action.
- Direct readers with headlines and sub-headlines
- Keep paragraphs and sentences short
- Avoid industry jargon and difficult-to-understand vocabulary words
- Proofread before publishing
5) Responsive Design
It’s no secret America has gone mobile mad. As smartphones abound, businesses must adapt their websites to suit this growing demographic.
Mobile friendly web design is a method that builds websites that can scale to appear perfectly on any type of mobile device. Responsive design, as it is also known, is now a major key to improving brand user experience.
6) Loading Speed
It’s also possible to lose visitors before they even reach your page. If your site loads too slowly, it can also raise your bounce rate. This can apply to the overall site or individual pages.
Your page speed can be jeopardized by:
- Large image file size
- Fancy flash design
- Embedded media from external sources
- Complex code
7) Searchability
A search field is a must unless you have a one-page website with hardly any content. On larger sites, visitors expect a search bar to help them quickly navigate to all the information they need. Typically, these search bars sit in the top right corner of a page so they are easy to find.
Today, anyone and everyone has a website, but there is a notable difference between those sites that perform well and those that do not. If you would like to not only attract traffic but retain it long enough to convert visitors into leads, implement these seven tips.
