Billgates Smart Quote
3 Main Web Design Tenants for Marketers
Most website architecture does not meet its intended objectives, which is why most businesses/people are not realising optimal Return on Investment (ROI) off of their digital investments. What do we mean? well, there is no real change in their number of relevant leads and businesses still continue to experience low conversion rates. When you look at it, delivering technical solutions that solve your customer needs is very important in today’s digital world but still a rare thing. Consumers have moved beyond the traditional website and now expect to consume information when, where and how they want it.
Having said that, lets get to the 3 main tenants you as a marketers can not afford to lose sight of when getting a website for your business, if you are to get the best out of your website today. These 3 tenants are:
- Functionality
- Responsiveness
- Website Loading Speed
NB. In this post we will briefly look at Functionality. We will take a look at the other 2 tenants in the next post.
1. Functionality
The functionality of a website is the interactive part of the site – that allows visitors to navigate, perform certain actions; go to desired portions of the website, input their information and/or respond in some way that is intended to meet company goals. Functionality integrates a design that is appealing and engages visitors with an underlying usability that drives conversions or meets company objectives. Basically a good functional design solves problems, achieves results, and communicates the company’s message effectively.
In otherwords a good visual functional web design needs to support business objectives, such as getting visitors to consume the content and expand the brand reach, respond to the calls to action; downloads, subscriptions, signups, and inquiries etc depending on the company goals. Neil Patel puts is this way, a “Good design is more than just pretty pictures.”
Types of functionality a website can have:
Shopping Cart
Email form
It can be form the simple feedback to long survey forms
Other Functionalities
- Social Sharing icons
- Subscribe forms
- Database Form
- Menu items
- Read more buttons
- Online Credit Card Processing
Design Principles:
By applying some tried-and-true design principles, you can make your website functional (appealing to visitors and more effective) in achieving your objectives. With that said, lets get to some important principles you as a marketers should adhere to when deciding what type of functionality is best suited to for your purposes:
- Reduce the number of clicks for visitor to take desired action.
- Simplify the interaction, do not over complicate things or over engineer.
- Include only goal driven functionality, as opposed to the fact that you can or it makes the website pretty.
- In-cooperate visual hierarchies to allow visitors to identify the most important elements on a web page.
- Make sure the interlinks within the website are all working and relevant.
- Use bold colour and high contrast.
- Always keep testing (A/B split testing) to improve usability and conversions
In conclusion, simplify the layout to increase the conversion rates, make it easy for visitors to find what they want.
Hope this post was a helpful in getting you started when it comes to website functionality.
Look forward to our next post, as we go in-depth on the above mentioned tips and touch on the other two tenants, Responsiveness and Loading speed of the website. We will give you actionable tips on how you can capitalise on these aspects and increase your chances of achieving your business goals.