3 Examples of Highly Effective Website Designs

If you want to attract traffic to your site and keep visitors there, design is absolutely critical. This another reason why it’s so important to have a mobile-friendly site.

In this post, we are going to have a look at a few successful designs and then discuss the reasons why they are so effective.

Tell Your Visitor What You Offer and What They Should Do Next

Below is a screenshot of the home page of Appcase. Notice that their headline and call-to-action are very prominently displayed above the fold.

“We help you turn your app into a profitable business” tells the visitor exactly what they do and the big green “TRY FOR FREE!” button makes it very simple for the visitor to take the next step.

The reason that having a compelling home page is so important is because, on average, 50% of visitors will leave your site after viewing just one page.

Given that your home page will receive the bulk of your traffic, it’s critical to clearly communicate your value proposition and tell your visitor what to do next.

A Call-to-Action “Above the Fold”

Newspapers may be dying, but their vocabulary and wisdom aren’t. The space “above the fold” on a newspaper is the first thing you see when a folded newspaper is put in front of you. The top headline is the biggest news the paper has to offer on that day.

On a website, the “fold” is the bottom of the browser window, and you have to have a design that understands where that fold will fall whether your visitors have a 30-inch monitor, a tablet, or a smartphone. (Responsive design is your best friend, but that’s a topic for another article.)

And here’s another piece of newspaper wisdom: you don’t want to save your best content for last, whether that’s the best details or the juiciest quotes.

Newspaper writers know that readers are likely to bail on an article before they get to the end. As well as establishing credibility at a glance, a call to action lets your visitor know that you can offer a solution to their problems, and that can contribute to getting them to scroll down.

Remember, you can put all the information you want below the fold (as HubSpot does), so keep the most important content right at the top.

Provide More Inform

ation For Visitors Who Aren’t Ready to Take the Plunge

This is the web, and you’ve got an infinite vertical scroll to work with. Visitors are often more comfortable with a long, linear flow of information than they are with getting lost in a maze of nested links.

Once your visitor begins scrolling down, you can feed them the information that they crave and that you want them to know. Tell them how your product works, how it’s worked for others, and how it can work for them. Lower the risks for them by offering any applicable guarantees, free trial periods, testimonials, etc. Answer the visitor’s questions.

Offer Something of Value

On BrightIdeas.co, the visitor is immediately offered the opportunity to become a subscriber and approximately 6% of this site’s visitors choose to become a subscriber right away.

They reason for this is that there are a couple of key elements in play with design:

1. Social Proof
2. Premium Content

Social Proof

Few things are more powerful than social proof, and using it to show your readers why they need to pay attention to your message works extremely well.

Notice the image is of Trent holding an award for being a PROFIT 100 company CEO. For first time visitors, this clearly shows that he’s been quite successful as an entrepreneur.

Then, in the text, you can see the phrase, “Join 10,321 marketing entrepreneurs…”. That tells the visitor that plenty of other people have downloaded the premium content.

Premium Content

When you ask a visitor for their contact information, the best way to get it is to use an ethical bribe. In this case, when a visitor enters their contact information, they are going to be given a 4 part video series on how to maximize conversions.

Take Steps to Improve Your Website’s Performance

The strategies above can get you started, but they only scratch the surface. To learn more about maximizing the performance of your website, download our 25 Website Must Haves ebook today.

Trent Dyrsmid writes at BrightIdeas.co, where he shares proven marketing strategies you can use to attract more traffic, increase conversions, and maximize profits. For bright ideas on how leverage content marketing and marketing automation, join his free newsletter.