Do you guide the traffic on your website efficiently?
What does it mean to drive traffic on your website?
Well, of course we are defining “traffic” as visitors to your website. The act of guiding the traffic on your website is to design and structure the site in such a way as to “push” visitors in a certain direction by making certain links and buttons the obvious choices to find what they are searching for.
The first step is to use a design that is well organized and easy for the visitor to understand. They must immediately recognize what is being presented to them, the purpose of the website, and what they can expect.
Scrolling is earned.
Anything the visitor has to scroll to see will be far less important to them than the elements they can see when they first open the website. They should immediately see your company’s branding, figure out quickly what you are offering, and also know exactly what they need to do to find more. This means that the initial artwork should not push important links and content so far down the screen as to hide it from view at first glance. Do not count on a user scrolling down. You MUST first interest them enough to make them want to scroll down.
You have to earn that scroll down and the user has to be interested first.
Put it at the top!?
So this means we should put ALL of our links and content right at the top! Right?!
Not exactly. What this means is that we need to balance our design and make the BEST use of our screen space. We need to balance how much this space is used to brand the website, show off “pretty” graphics, display content, and of course present navigation options. This means that – yes, the navigation should be immediately viewable, but the three to five MOST IMPORTANT items should be set apart from the rest… made to be more noticeable.
How?
The Call to Action
This is done differently with every website, however the most common method is to use several “calls to action”. A “call to action” is a website element that draws a user in to make an action. This can be seen on the Creative Impact Website below.
Notice that the branding is clearly shown, the main five divisions of our company is presented, a banner, and then four very large and obvious buttons. These are our “calls to action”. These are the products or services we are pushing at the moment and we are guiding our traffic into those sections of the website. Once our visitors move to those pages, we repeat the process by narrowing the banner and presenting them with several more “call to actions”.
Visit the site to see it in action.
http://creativeimpactsolutions.com/
Alternate Options
Of course, if the users are not interested in any of our call to actions, we have also presented them with methods to view our various divisions of services, which then drill down to other “calls to action”, see our portfolio, or contact us immediately. Our goal with this website is to make it easy for a visitor to find what they are looking for.
Readily Available Contact Options
In most situations, you will want your visitor to contact you and you want this process to be easy. Notice the ease by which visitors can find a way to contact us on any page. There are three separate buttons that lead to an additional contact form, and there is a contact form on every page tucked to the left.
Generating a lead is the main purpose of our website, therefore it is designed for ease of navigation and for the capture of the lead by guiding the traffic to the information they are seeking, and then providing them with an easy and quick way to contact our company regarding the information they were presented with. We educate our visitors about the quality of our services, then make it very easy to contact us regarding them.
Wrapping it up…
You have five seconds to “grab” your visitors attention and draw them into your website. You need to build instant trust with a quality design and layout, make it immediately obvious what your website is about, and then get them to relevant content before they get impatient. Guide your visitors to where you want them on your website, provide easy “directions” to the pages you want them on. Once they are there, you will need to make it easy to convert that visitor.
Wait… Converting Visitors?
Converting a visitor means that you have achieved your goal with their visit. That could mean they purchased something, filled out a form which generated a lead for your sales team, made a phone call to you, or obtained information you are attempting to share. Read more about converting visitors in our upcoming article. Converting Visitors on Your Website.
We Can Help
Creative Impact Solutions offers quality website design and development that incorporates all of the concepts discussed in this article. We discuss with our clients how to best make use of their internet presence and help them implement a powerful solution that converts visitors.
