When we think of web design, we usually think of talented beautifiers who take our often “meh” hub for branding and turn it into a glittering display of our hard work.
A good web designer can make your brand look good. A great web designer can unearth your brand’s true potential.
If you’re designing a website for the first time or you’re redesigning an existing site, it’s important you think about your web designer as so much more than a magic wand waver and start thinking of them as an architect for your message.
5 Signs Your Website Isn’t Converting Your Message
- High Bounce Rate
An obvious sign that your site isn’t connecting with visitors is if they are bailing quickly. That doesn’t necessarily mean your content isn’t good, it can just mean they aren’t finding it easily.
- You Can’t Find Things on Your Own Site
Admit it, you’ve lost content on your own site. This shows a lack of intelligent design. And a lack of simplification. If you’re struggling, you can believe your visitors are.
- Your Homepage is Ever Expanding
If you are constantly adding more slides, more content, more links to your homepage, odds are you’re creating some overwhelm.
- You’ve Been At It For Years
An old website is almost always suffering from a lack of clarity. Years of content and tweaks and changes can muddy your message. All businesses evolve over time, but the website can often lag.
- Engagement Is Higher Everywhere But Your Website
While on-site interaction may not be as high as social media, if you’re seeing a huge gap between how many people follow you and how many people come to your site to make a purchase, sign up for your newsletter or digest your content, there is something that is translating from one platform to the next.
How Web Designers Help
If you can’t see the forest for the trees then a great web designer is the lumberjack you need. The best designers are content organizers not content creators. They are able to get the birds eye view on what you are trying to say, what you’re trying to sell and how you connect those with smooth, navigable design.
You may think a particular message is the primary conversation, but a designer may see it differently. Listen to them. Consider what your brand looks like through someone else’s eyes.
Designers are accustomed to putting themselves in the shoes of a first-time visitor. You however, have never been a first-time visitor to your brand’s hub. Even on day one of your site’s creation, you’re not a first time visitor. Your knowledge is too intimate.
Live Conversations
Another important part of unburying your message is to make sure you’re having live conversations about your site. And as designers ourselves, we’re here to tell you that it may not be easy to pull your designer out of their dark corner and onto a phone call, Skype or in-person meeting, but it does make a huge difference.
If you’re in the circumstance where you’re struggling to put on paper exactly what you want your brand to say, then you might need to just riff with your designer in real time before you get to the center. Every business owner is guilty of burying their own leads, but a quality designer can hear a throw away sentence and extract the real purpose of your site.
Simplification
As the word “buried” might imply, most brands’ websites suffer from over-complication. Anyone who has ever started or run a business knows they can be a little indulgent when it comes to their platforms. We think every word needs to be said, every link needs to be shared, we estimate the need for 15 tabs in our navigation menu and 47 free offering pop-ups triggered on 80 different pages.
That’s not how designers see things though.
Designers like simple, clean, white space-abundant pages. They want three words where you think there should be 13. They want a single large image where you want eight.
Give them that room to let your message air out. Short user attention spans does not mean you have to cram as much information as possible into the least amount of space. It means you need to turn three paragraphs into a meme.
Allow photos to speak 1000 words. And for 20 words to become 4. It’s going to hurt for most creatives. But this kind of reducing and minimizing will help your message shine.
Web designers see information in a totally different way than the rest of us. They are fabulous editors, awesome organizers and delightfully ruthless simplifiers. And for that, we love them!