Designing Effective Site Content: 4 Tips for Making an Impact
Writing powerful, persuasive, evocative copy is hard. A multitude of factors need to be considered before the work even begins, from target audiences to the method of communication, all the way down to determining the core question: what do you want to say?
But having the best, most beautifully-written content in the world isn’t enough. If it’s not presented well, it’s unlikely that anyone will read it — and worse yet, it may impact your credibility with your audience and their perception of your brand.
Throughout my tenure as a web designer at DealerOn, I’ve seen a lot of sites and read over pages upon pages of content while helping our clients transform their text and photos to best connect with their audience and align with their brand. Here are four tips I’ve learned along the way for how to craft content that converts.
1. Know your medium.
Web is a beast unlike any other. There are many considerations that must be made at every step in the design and development process, from the extremely-technical ones related to the specifics of hardware and software requirements to the more business-minded questions of target audience, conversion rates, and more (which then must be re-considered for desktop versus mobile, but I digress).
What works for print may not work for web and vice-versa: to design effective content, you have to know your medium and know it well. This means reviewing your existing campaigns and re-evaluating them completely, along with your understanding of your audience, then adjusting your strategies as needed.
Appraise your audience.
Depending on your assessment of your target audience for your product or service, you may be running both print ads and web ads at the same time. Different segments of your target audience will utilize these forms of media in distinct ways, however; to most effectively communicate with your audience, you’ll want to diversify your content to make the most of the advantages and expectations associated with each medium.
As an example, try taking a look at your audience by generational segment. For the most part, those who still seek out and trust print over web are members of older generational segments like Baby Boomers and seniors. Millennials and those in Gen X and Gen Z use print less frequently, but prioritize the types of information they receive from the web differently; members of Gen X may still hold traditional media in high regard, but will extensively research web content, while younger generations are more trusting of web content and refer to print media less often.
When crafting content for your site, you’ll want to keep demographic traits like these in mind. Consider how needs, perspectives, and methods of conversion vary by medium and become familiar with these variations. Doing so will ensure your messages pack a punch and reach your audience members effectively.
Design in mind.
In addition to differences in your audience, there are also differences to consider in how your content is displayed, as well as how your audience interacts with it.
Consider your site features and then re-consider them after assessing how they would look on a mobile screen.
Say you have a print ad that runs in the newspaper and you’d like to put that same content on your site. While you could simply put the image on a landing page, add a Call-to-Action (CTA) button, and call it complete, you may find yourself running into problems. For one thing, if there is a lot of text in your print ad, it is likely to not be legible if a user is viewing it on a mobile device. For another, unless you have taken the time to transcribe the image, your message won’t be accessible to users who utilize screen readers and other assistive technologies to access your site.
This also applies to features of your current site. Consider your site features and then re-consider them after assessing how they would look on a mobile screen. Content that looks fine on desktop where it can be separated into multiple columns may take up a lot of space on a mobile screen, requiring the user to scroll extensively to see the next section of content. Make use of read-mores or other methods of breaking up the section to mitigate the risk of mobile users abandoning the page before reaching content you want them to see.
Designers and content owners alike should have an understanding of the expectations and requirements associated with the media they are working with in order to best meet the needs of the audience. Working with your designers to use best practices for web content will ensure that your audience is always able to easily digest the information you’re presenting, regardless of how they’re accessing it.
2. Create consistency.
Your website is a huge opportunity to bolster your brand and reach a massive audience. However, this will only be beneficial to your brand if your messaging is consistent, both on and off your site. If your business has a logo, make sure it’s on all of your communications, from the header of your website to your print ads, business cards, and other marketing materials.
Consider your site to be another part of your corporate identity package: all parts of it should reflect your business, its culture, mission, and calls-to-action. Your customer base should be able to recognize your business regardless of the medium in which they encounter it, and it is imperative for your brand and site’s visual communication, including layout and organization, to be consistent in order for all elements of your branding to work together effectively.
Hand in hand.
Consistency builds trust. This isn’t just a mantra, either, as there’s ample research to back it up.
The Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University has conducted years of research on what makes websites credible and have established 10 guidelines for web credibility. One guideline is that sites must be designed to look professional (or to be otherwise appropriate for its purpose) in order to be perceived as trustworthy.
Their research found that users place a lot of stock in the appearance of a site: one study found that nearly half of users (approximately 46%) will base their estimate of a site’s credibility on design elements such as typography, color schemes, font sizes, and layouts. A separate study showed that 94% of comments regarding first impressions of a site were related to its design, while only 6% were related to the site’s content.
Keep your site’s features consistent with user expectations.
To boost your site’s credibility, a consistent approach to the site’s design is key. Lay out internal pages similarly so that users will know where they can expect to find certain types of information (for example, if you have a sidebar on most of your internal pages with your address and some related links to other internal pages, keep this setup similar on other pages as well). This is in addition to keeping the content of your communications uniform as well: use similar tone, verbiage, expressions, and phrasing to best connect with your audience and build your company’s image.
Design in mind.
While the purpose of design is to innovate and find more effective solutions to problems, it’s not necessary to revolutionize every feature of your site. Users are savvy and have come to expect certain behaviors from the websites they use; an example is the so-called “hamburger” menu button that opens the site’s navigation when viewed on mobile devices. Keep your site’s features consistent with user expectations, at least to a degree. Once familiarity is established, you can begin to push the bounds of their comfort zones with new and interesting approaches.
Typography is another factor that must be kept consistent in order to preserve credibility. Effective typography exudes professionalism and communicates information efficiently, serving to build trust with the user.
A good rule of thumb is to limit sites to two fonts — one for headings and one for body text — and to use varying weights to add style and emphasis. This keeps sites from looking chaotic and also establishes a visual hierarchy for your users, allowing them to “follow the fonts” to draw their eye to different sections of the page. Additional fonts compete for attention and detract from the appearance of professionalism, so keeping these to a minimum is best.
A similar rule applies to colors. Your site’s color scheme should be consistent with your branding and applied site-wide. CTAs and other buttons should be within a limited set of colors that don’t vary from the set palette. Like fonts, setting your color scheme in this fashion establishes a visual hierarchy and teaches your users what to look for, directing their eyes to your conversion-oriented content first and foremost.
3. Kill your darlings.
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
This quote, oft attributed to William Faulkner, has been a staple in writer’s guides and workshops for decades. It refers to how you should consider your writing when you’re revising it: set all sentiment aside and look at it objectively. No matter how much the writer cares about a particular phrase, sentence, or even whole chapter they’ve written, if the passage does not benefit the reader (or, worse yet, confuses them), it should be cut and reworked.
Though this advice is typically applied to fiction, it applies to the content on your site, too — when reviewing your site’s content, you’ll need to consider what’s most important and trim away the less-relevant parts, no matter how much you care about them. Prioritize the needs of your audience over your own wants.
Move it or lose it.
This prioritization is especially critical on your homepage, where users are assembling their first impressions of your site, product offerings, and brand. Here, lead-generating content needs to be front and center.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t have content that isn’t directly related to lead-generation. On the contrary, you should have it: for one thing, it boosts your SEO, and it is also likely to be relevant and interesting to many users on your site. However, you need to appeal to users quickly in order to get them to stay on your site, and content that has been carefully prioritized to best meet user expectations will be of the greatest benefit.
Use your interior pages to your advantage and move the content you’ve trimmed there to free up space on your homepage. An added benefit is that giving the user a quick taste of the information before inviting them to read more may hook them and get them to stay on your site longer, while presenting all that information at once could instead be overwhelming.
Design in mind.
Again, this advice goes far beyond prose and copy. Designers are constantly experimenting with new methods of laying out page content and making the most of the powerful medium that is the web, but these experiments don’t always work as expected (which is why rigorous user testing is extremely important!).
While a designer might be intensely proud of their mock-up or the code they wrote for a section of a page, that mock-up may not translate well to the screen or the user experience might be confusing for those who will actually utilize the page. It could also be that the design is simply not in line with what the client is looking for, no matter how great of a solution we may consider it to be.
Though it’s difficult, it’s necessary to be as objective as possible when considering all aspects of your site, from the copy to the layout and more. As the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility note:
Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology.
At the end of the day, the primary audience for the site is the potential customer, not the content creator or designer. Information and designs must be curated to be both easy to use and useful for these audience members; thus, we must be willing to kill our darlings in order to provide them with the greatest benefit.
4. Keep it simple.
Imagine you’re getting seated at a restaurant you’ve never been to before. You’ve heard it’s great, and it comes highly recommended by your friends, so you’re excited to try it. The server leads you to your table, takes your drink order, and then hands you an enormous menu, with row upon row of items listed one after the next in a small font.
Before you’ve even begun to process what you’re reading, the server is back with your drink and asking for your order. You thought you had an idea of what you wanted when you came in, but now that you’re faced with all the options before you and the server pressing for an answer, you freeze.
It’s all too easy to be overcome by “decision paralysis” when faced with too many options. At a restaurant, the stakes aren’t all that high — even if you ended up getting something you didn’t like, you’ll only be out a few dollars. However, when it comes to your site, where your users can easily navigate away if they’re confused or overwhelmed, decision paralysis can be costly.
Simplicity is sweet.
Preventing decision paralysis is critical, particularly on conversion-oriented pages. Too much text, too many images, and too many CTAs on a page all cause conversion rates to plummet. Research shows that the vast majority of users will leave a web page within 10 seconds (though 5–7 seconds is a safer rule of thumb to follow). If they can’t find what they’re looking for or can’t decide what’s most important for them to interact with, they’re liable to navigate away in search of more straightforward results.
The solution? Keep things simple.
Avoid overwhelming users with numerous links, offers, call-to-actions, and other items competing for their attention on one page. Make it easy for them to filter content and confirm that what they’re looking for is present. Emphasize the most important actions and streamline your content with clear, direct writing, effective headings and subheadings, and enough white space for users to be able to rest their eyes while parsing the information you’re presenting to them.
Design in mind.
The centerpiece of all this effort is to put emphasis on your Call-to-Action. Since this is what is generating leads and driving conversions, your primary CTA needs to be the focal point of your page. Simplifying your content safeguards that your primary CTA is not competing for attention and that it will be noticed by your user base quickly, within that slim window where they are deciding whether to leave the page.
Looking to trim the content that appears on your page, but not sure which aspects to keep or toss? Try A/B testing photos, links, and headings to see which have the greatest effects on conversion rates. You can also use this to test phrasing or coloration for your most important CTAs to find out what best speaks to your audience. A/B testing is a great tool for learning more about your audience and the effectiveness of your content as well.
Presenting a simplified, clutter-free design boosts the professionalism of your site while also making it easy for your users to quickly assess your content and generate leads for your business. If your Call-to-Action is lost in a sea of other links, buttons, and content, you’ll damage both your conversion rates and your credibility with your user base. Cut unnecessary content and make easy-to-follow, consistent color schemes and hierarchies to prevent decision paralysis in your users and keep your bounce rates from skyrocketing.
Closing Thoughts
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve likely noticed that these ideas mesh closely with each other. That’s because they’re all equally important for building your site’s credibility and making an impact on your user base. Consistency, simplicity, and understanding of both your audience and your medium are critically important to creating impressive sites that generate leads and drive sales conversions.
