Web Design for Visual Impact or Customer Needs?
Do you need a website that has visual impact? Hits you right between the eyes?
Would you be surprised if I told you that a visual impact website could be driving your customers away?
I’ve often found that business people come to the conclusion that they need a “visual impact” website by going through a process that is something like this:
- Looking at what the big players do on thier websites. They usually include large retailers like McDonalds, Coca Cola or Target.
- Looking at what’s cool on the web – Think Web 2.0, Youtube and Myspace
- Deciding that their website needs to be like that.
Of course, that approach gives little thought to the poor old customer. Here’s a picture of that customer waiting on the end of their “Broadband” ADSL connection:
- Still waiting for the page to load
- Bamboozled and confused
- Looking up someone else’s website instead
- Still looking for the information that they went to your site for in the first place!
To understand the difference betweed your business and a large retailer, you need to know this one thing:
Large corporates and retailers don’t want leads!
That’s right, most large business have a sales channel or a massive distribution network that puts them within an arm’s reach of their customers. They don’t want the phone to ring, they don’t want web enquiries, as they couldn’t do anything with the leads anyway (There are some exceptions of course).
If your business is not a large retailer with a presence on every street corner, then consider this:
People are visiting your website to find out how you can help them!Â
Visual impact cannot on its own tell them how you can help them solve their problems, needs and wants. Words can.
What you have to say (copywriting) is the single most important part of your website and marketing message. It must be:
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InterestingÂ
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Targeted and relevant to your customers (What’s in it for me?)
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Clear and readable
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Designed to lead to action.
That said, it’s incredibly important that your web design is visually pleasing, and that’s why we employ some of the best design talent in Australia. However, we never allow design and creativity to get in the way of the conversion or lead generation process.
About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.
Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.
