by Lewis Robinson
Making sure your website is visually appealing is an important aspect of your web design. However, the visual beauty of your site alone cannot do the job in getting your visitors to interact with your site. Over time, businesses including eCommerce sites have found that using design to engage users is an essential part of making a site successful.
Here are five high-tech web design strategies you can use to boost the engagement metrics on your site:
1. Improve Your Site’s Navigation.
If you want to engage users and get them to take action, you have to make it easy for them to do so. The best way to go about doing this is to work on your navigation. Start with the navigation menu and organize it in a way so that users can easily find what they are looking for. Then, make sure that users can easily go back and forth with breadcrumb links. Finally, you need to work on your site’s search function. Make sure your pages are properly tagged or optimized so that the right pages come up when users use the search function.
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2. Use Graphical Cues and Design on Your CTAs.
When it comes to CTAs, many websites drop the ball. Whether you want your users to subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on social media, purchase a product or play your video, you want to make sure that it stands out from the rest of your site’s content. Little things like using a graphical box and a button can do a better job than regular anchor texts. According to Copyblogger, CreateDebate saw a 45% boost in clicks by making their CTAs look like buttons. You can also add little cues like graphical pointers, scribbled text, play button cues, and other small edits to make your links and interactive website elements stand out.
3. Use a Presentation and Layout that Invites Action.
It’s becoming increasingly important what users see at the top of the fold. Internet users are used to the typical everyday designs, so you need a presentation and layout that grabs attention and invites them to take action. Ecommerce sites like Halo are doing this with large graphical layouts on their main page. Some sites present users with a large slideshow carousel that starts out by offering a free sample of the product then rotates to their other popular products. Other eCommerce sites simply have a listing of their products and users have to either find what they’re looking for or figure out what they should get.
4. Improve Your UX Design and You’ll Drive Engagement.
The umbrella of UX design includes everything from usability, user interface, interactions, to the general browsing experience. You want to tackle UX design step by step. Start by improving the user interface (app interface, navigation menu, site architecture, etc.). Then move on to the usability (browser compatibility, load times, broken links, mobile device compatibility, etc.). Finally, work on using interactive elements when relevant and think about what you can do to improve the general user experience. The optimization of your site with the newest techniques to attract clients can be achieved more effectively if you enlist the help of a trusted web design and management company.
5. Use Visual Storytelling Rather than Walls of Text.
By using relevant visuals to support your content, you can drive higher engagement numbers. BuzzSumo reported that adding proper images every 100 words a far higher number of social shares than content that used no images or too many images. If you’re using a giant wall of text on your website, you can test the data yourself. Try changing formatting of your content and integrating a few images into your content and you’ll see a world of difference in your engagement numbers.
These are just some of the ways you can use web design to improve your site’s user engagement. There is no clear cut science on how to drive user engagement. It’s best to experiment and learn from other to figure out ideas you can use to drive engagement on your own website.
Lewis Robinson is a business consultant specializing in social media marketing, CRM, and sales. He’s begun multiple corporations and currently freelances as a writer and business consultant.
