Keep it ‘Above the fold’
We’ve said it once and we’ll say it again – first impressions matter in the digital age. Over 50% of visitors will click away from a site within the first 15 seconds if they don’t feel their needs are being met. It’s vital that what information is immediately available is relevant to them.
While the term is quite old (going back to the widespread use of the newspaper), its meaning remains fairly the same even now! In those first 15 seconds, visitors need to know who you are, what you do and why they should get you to do it.
It’s about you and what you do. Images with simple calls to action over them allow you to have the best of both worlds. Images show happy families interacting with your services or products, and your wording hooks them in because it tells them who you are and lets them know why they should trust their money with you!
Revive your fonts!
A lot of sites will stick with a very basic font that is easy to read. After all, the idea is for information to be laid out as clearly as possible. While this works fine, you don’t want your site to just be ‘fine’ – you want it to be great, and a huge part of that is making sure every aspect of your site conveys your businesses style. One of the most overlooked ways of doing this is through fonts.
As the digital world has grown, we’ve seen more font styles than ever coming out, each more unique than the last. This presents some great opportunities to present your business your way. Whether you want to stick with a traditional font like Georgia or keep it tidy with something along the lines of Helvetica, there’s a whole world of fonts out there.
The key is to pick one or two and use those. It’s easy to get font happy, but adding too many can create a mess and you lose the message you’re trying to send.
Modernise, modernise, modernise
As the internet grows, we see more opportunities to enhance a user’s experience on your site. It can be hard to keep up with all these new developments, but the key is to learn what ones will work for you. Now you don’t need to overhaul your entire site, as long as it’s running on a system that offers updates (WordPress is great for this, having recently released WordPress 5.2.2). If you’re using a dated system, this can present issues in how long your site takes to load, whether it’s responsive to different device sizes and how your content (images, text, videos, etc) is displaying.
If you are on a newer system, but still want to look for some other options, take a look at how your content is laid out. Are you using multiple columns within pages? Does your imagery fit nicely with your text? Do your colours and fonts scream ‘I haven’t been looked at in years’? These are smaller changes that can give your site a whole new look. It’s a new outfit for your page.
