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3 basic web design hacks to skyrocket your conversions

3 Basic Web Design Hacks to Skyrocket Your Conversions

3 basic web design hacks to skyrocket your conversions

Traffic is only as good as it CONVERTS into phone calls, sales, and revenue for your business. You can have the best website designed in the world, but if you cannot get your visitors to take action, you’re not going to be able to monetize the traffic.

In this article, we will discuss some basic and beginner-friendly tactics to ensure that people who visit your website get enough information to feel comfortable enough to pick up the phone and call your business or fill out that Contact Form. This is mostly applicable to independent business owners who may have put up their site a while ago and have not seen tangible results from it yet.

Prominent Call to Action

movie clapper actionMake sure your PHONE NUMBER is visible no matter where the visitor is on your site. An easy way to do this is to make it prominent in the top right corner of the site, visible on all pages along with your Navigation Menu. If your website does not have a prominent and clear call-to-action, ask your web design company to set one up as soon as possible.

Making it difficult for your customers to find your contact details is one of the biggest mistakes that beginner business owners make, especially when they haven’t had a professional consultation. For a customer to find their way to your Contact page just to find your number is big No-No!

You need to understand that your customers are going to be different kinds of people and at different places in the buying process. Some are going to want to call you right away and will get frustrated if they can’t find your number. Others won’t feel comfortable calling you just yet but might fill in a Contact Form to find out more. So, you also need to have a prominent secondary call-to-action to capture these leads.

Add Trust and Credibility Elements

trust puzzle

Understand that MOST people who come across your website DO NOT contact you. And think about why. Is it that they are just browsing for the services you provide and not really looking to buy? Or were they disappointed that the information on your site was not sufficient, so they went to look for someone else? Or perhaps you did have enough information, but they just didn’t feel comfortable or didn’t trust you yet?

All these are possibilities you must consider to improve your conversion rate. Think about the first impression that your site is giving to your visitors. If necessary, ask some people you know about how they feel when they first visit the site. It always helps to get a fresh visitor’s opinion on a site you might feel biased about as you may have put a lot of work into it.

Once you have a list of potential issues, think about how you can solve them on your site. For example, if trust is a factor, you can add some of your past client’s logo so convey that other businesses have trusted you. You can put up video testimonials as well.

If credibility and information is a problem, you can display some of well-known websites, magazines or newspapers that you have been featured in, put up photos of events you have spoken at or a video of a TV interview.

Harness Social Media to Humanize Your Business

harness social media

Your website is the online representation of your business. But don’t forget that people feel most comfortable buying from other people, rather than websites. This is particularly true for B2B businesses and service-based businesses.

As a human, you can only be at one place at a time. But as a website, if you do it right, you can be in many places and always be operating! So don’t make the mistake of hiding behind your website. Instead, use it to ramp up your presence online, create and publish as much content as you can, and you will see your organic leads go through the roof!

Social media helps to accomplish exactly this. It tells your visitors that your business is active and current and values their customers enough to engage with them on social media platforms. You can embed your feed in the Sidebar of your website if it goes with the look of your site or you can simply.

Vancouver Web Designer

Hurricane Web Design Vancouver
#1002 – 1831 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC V6G 1E4
(604) 256-7081
https://www.hurricaneweb.net/

10 website design trends expected for 2017

10 Website Design Trends Expected for 2017

Happy New Year! Now that 2016 is in the books, everyone is looking ahead to the upcoming year. In web design, this means looking at trends from the past two or three years, which set the direction for some stunning design innovations in 2017. Here are some of the big ones.

1. Big Type, Bold Statements

Websites are starting to use fewer words to get their point across, preferring it short and sweet rather than long and explanatory. This is allowing room for bigger and more creative fonts, and many of them are custom fonts rather than the typical ones we’re used to.

2. Composition

Composition refers to how everything is laid out, and the direction web design is headed points to simple, minimalist designs and layouts for 2017. This is not to say that websites will no longer contain information, but accessing it will be streamlined, either through longer scrolling or innovative navigation menus. This is all in response to the growing number of people using the web on mobile phones.

3. More Scalable Vector Graphics

Scalable Vector Graphics, or SVG, are a way of manipulating a graphic to resize it for different uses (say, cell phone screens versus tablets versus desktop computers). In the past, this was done by stretching and shrinking more traditional formats such as.JPEG and.GIF, but vector graphics have an advantage over these because they bypass pixels to present a crisp, clear graphic no matter what the device. Predictions for 2017 see the use of these growing in response to broader use.

4. Dynamic Color

Color schemes and palettes are moving in the direction of being less aggressive and bright. Some designers are using natural greens, browns, and pinks while other designers are going for pastels. Subtlety is the color of 2017.

5. Animations

Descriptive Zoopraxography Athletes Running Animated 12

Eadweard Muybridge [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Animations have always been part of web design because they’re eye-catching and fun. This will continue in 2017, especially as. GIFs become more mainstream. More attention will be focused on them this year, especially as new tools are developed to work with them.

6. Personalization

Web design has always been about attracting potential clients, and what better way to do that than by making it as appealing to individuals as a site can? Designers are looking this year toward making content personalized users, allowing them to filter their experience in new ways. This has already been a challenge, but this year more and more designers are taking it on.

7. Virtual Reality

While gamers will be among the first to benefit from this, web designers are challenged with incorporating virtual reality into websites. The objective is to take the user’s experience to the next level by making the site highly interactive and the visuals sweeping and immersive.

8. New Navigation Menu Conventions

Navigation menus will undergo changes in the coming year. Traditional menus are on the top or down the side of a site, but more designers have been creating new menus that will eventually replace the old conventions. These include splash menus, constraint menus, and especially visual menus with pictures that link to the text information.

9. Smoother Transitions During Load Time

Web designers call the transition during a page’s load time “interstitial anxiety,” referring to the anticipation of the user while the page loads. Transitions during this phase are not just about fast load times this year. They’re also about presenting content to users while they wait, so the user has something pleasing or interesting to the eye as the page is loading.

10. Age-Oriented Design

An important aspect of a user’s experience with the web is whether or not the content is useful to them. Websites are usually made with an “average” audience in mind, but more websites now will be designing with age in mind. This means muted colors, larger letters, and simplicity for elderly users, and bright colors, cartoonish fonts, and lots of animations for younger users.

These are just a few of the exciting innovations in web design this year, changes which can bring a stylish look to any website. Designers are looking at making sites that are informative but also pleasing to the eye, leading it around the page to maximize the user’s experience. Ease of use is a target goal this year, and designers are working hard to come up with new ways to make that happen.

Web Designer Vancouver

Hurricane Web Design Vancouver
#1002 – 1831 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC V6G 1E4
(604) 256-7081
https://www.hurricaneweb.net/


nick rojasNick Rojas is a self-taught, serial entrepreneur who’s enjoyed success working with and consulting for startups. Using his journalism training, Nick writes for publications such as Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, and Yahoo. He concentrates on teaching small and medium-sized enterprises how best to manage their social media marketing and define their branding objectives.

Five Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Website

mobile web designIf you are the decision maker for marketing your business, then there’s no question you recognize just how necessary it is that you have a strong presence on the web. There are many ways to create this presence, from social media websites to blog sites, and you need to have a presence on all of them. One of the current, most effective means of taking complete advantage of the Internet’s marketing potential is by having a mobile site. A mobile website is exactly what it seems to be – a website specifically produced to be accessed on mobile devices. So, why does your company need to have a mobile website if its conventional web site is doing quite well?

Here are 5 convincing reasons why you need a mobile site:

Visual beauty

You may be wondering why everyone can’t view your conventional site on their mobile devices. The reality is, they can. The additional reality is that your conventional website simply does not look that good on a mobile device. Do this: access your website and reduce the view on your computer’s web browser by zooming out until you have to squint to read the content on the page. I think you would agree, this is not a good viewing experience, is it?

The statistics

The numbers don’t lie. Simply put, there are more people today who utilize their mobile devices to access the web than they do their desktop computer or laptop computers. Additionally, a lot of people who are on the Internet today ONLY do so through their mobile devices. Can your business afford not to meet this significantly big sector of the market?

The cost of data transfer

A significant number of mobile customers must pay data transfer charges. Conventional websites have much more data than mobile websites and therefore can cost people a great deal of money to view your website. Ask yourself this: how many customers are willing to have to pay you in order to have your market to them?

Navigation

As mentioned before, conventional websites are a great deal smaller on those small mobile device displays. This means that visitors to your website need to do a great deal of scrolling in order to view the whole page… and let’s be honest, website visitors would rather not work in order to view a web page. Likewise, it’s almost impossible to tap navigation buttons on such a small display when the website hasn’t been enhanced for mobile devices.

Today’s audience on the web

The truth is that a lot of people, including your potential clients, access the web by means of a mobile device. This also means that a lot of people utilize their mobile devices for a great number of things – shopping, searching, entertainment, and a whole lot more – plus these are all features you could include in your mobile site to widen your reach and increase your client base.

As you may see, there are a number of excellent reasons to design a mobile website for your business as quickly as you can. The mobile website experts at Hurricane Web Design can help you create a mobile site for your business. Feel free to contact us at 604-477-1996 or email us at questions@hurricanewebdesign.com.

Web Design Company Vancouver

Hurricane Web Design Vancouver
#1002 – 1831 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC V6G 1E4
(604) 256-7081

Design by committee

It’s so easy to tell when a design has been put through a committee instead of having one person in charge of a design. In all of my experience of designing by committee, the focus seems to get lost. Everybody feels they have to have input and a piece of the design. Let’s face it, we all think differently. The designer may have a great idea but it can get messed up by a committee of people with different ideas.

A perfect example of “Design by committee” is the recent redesign of the Vancouver Canucks’ uniforms. It looks as though it started out as a good idea but went sideways before it was completed. They got some things right and something terribly wrong.

Here is what I think the conversation sounded like when the committee got together to decide what to do…

Member #1: “We really should go back to the vintage color style of the uniforms. Everybody seems to love the blue/green/white by looking at our jersey sales. The vintage jerseys are outselling our current version. Plus, the color represents the west coast so much better.”

Committee Head: “I like the color, but we can’t get rid of the constipated whale logo. Even though an Orca in need of a laxative has nothing to do with a Canuck, we have to keep it. The ownership group is Orca Bay so we have to keep it.”

Member #1: “But the color of the whale logo is all wrong for the vintage color scheme. It just won’t work.”

Committee Head: “How about we change the color of the constipated whale so it’s just blue, black and white? I know it will look all washed out but it will work, I think.”

Member #3: “Wait! We should put the vintage logo on the jersey and get rid of the whale.”

Committee Head: “We absolutely cannot get rid of the whale. Corporate will not go for that even though our fans like the vintage logo so much better.”

Member #3: “Then we should put the vintage logo on each shoulder. There’s lots of room on the jerseys for us to clutter it up.”

Committee Head: “Good idea. We wouldn’t want to have a focused logo so let’s have two.”

Member #4: “With the Olympics coming in 2010 we’re going to have a lot of tourists visiting Vancouver. We really need to put “Vancouver” somewhere on the jerseys so all of these people can buy our hockey jersey and say ‘We’ve been in Vancouver.’ ”

Committee Head: “That’s a fantastic idea. What a great way to add more clutter. Plus, our fans are so dumb they probably don’t know they live in Vancouver. How smart can they be when they liked the vintage jerseys instead of the version we’ve had for the past ten years that we spent so much money on designing? Decision made. Meeting adjourned.”

All of this is a perfect example of a ‘kludge’ (or alternatively ‘kluge’) which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as:

“An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole.”

By the way, this redesign cost the team $1 million.

Web Design Services Vancouver

Hurricane Web Design Vancouver
#1002 – 1831 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC V6G 1E4
(604) 256-7081