Optimal Website Design

The goal of your website is to convince your visitor to do what you want them to do. This, obviously, needs to coincide with their personal objectives. When someone takes the next step in the process that you have designed for them to follow, that’s known as a “conversion”. A high conversion rate implies that there is an optimal way to design websites so that the visitor and the site owner both get what they want as often as possible.

Current Website Design Techniques Don’t Work

Should form follow function, or function follow form? Put another way, should we design a website to do what we want it to and then give it a face or the other way around? Hopefully, the answer’s obvious to you but we happen to subscribe to the idea that it’s difficult to put lipstick on a pig and get anything other than a pig wearing lipstick, if you follow.

“Website design” has historically meant creating a nice-looking website with some good content, usually in that order. The customer rarely entered the equation and if so, not in a manner that could be proven to be very effective.

How Should A Website Be Designed?

Our approach is drastically different. Putting the face on our creation is one of the last things to be accomplished. Focusing on customer needs and buying processes and co-ordinating them with our selling processes is where we focus our resources.

Here’s a rough outline of the order in which we suggest your website should be brought into existence:

  • Step 1: Develop your personas.
  • Step 2: Wireframe the site.
  • Step 3: Develop your content.
  • Step 3.5: Storyboard the site.
  • Step 4: Program/code the site.
  • Step 5: Test and Track.

Notice where designing the “pretty face” is? Bottom of the list in Step 4. That’s because it’s much smarter to stretch a new skin over a perfect website than it is to wedge the same site in an inteface that just doesn’t work on one or more levels of application.

With that in mind, we suggest that you build your new website using the procedure outlined above.

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