3 Most Important things Your Website Designer is Missing!!
Grab the checklist: http://lovins.co/designermistakes
This week we’re talking about common mistakes that web designers make. We cover the 3 BIG things that most Website Designers are missing, and how to fix it on your own website.
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TRANSCRIPT:
I’m Cathy Olson of Love Inspired, love-inspired.com and today, I just might ruffle some feathers but that’s okay. We’re gonna be talking about what your website designer is missing and what you can do about it. First off, I feel like I should give you a little bit of background just in case we’ve never met. I am a graphic and web designer. I’ve been a designer professionally for 17 years and I’ve run my own business for almost 10 years and I can say that your designer is doing this wrong because I did it wrong for a really long time. This isn’t really taught in graphic design so don’t feel bad if your designer did this or if you are a designer and you’re currently doing this. Just get better and let’s just fix it so you can feel awesome and you can make a bigger impact with your website and book more clients.
#1 The design needs to support the function of the site. Above the look and feel, above the cool, fun graphics, function is the upmost importance and this has to be number one before you even get started on a website design and you might be thinking, of course I thought of the objective. I’m making a website for my business. But have you? Because I see a lot of websites that actually aren’t selling. They’re not doing their primary purpose. Their prime objective is to get more clients and they’re not working. Yes, they’re beautiful but they’re not working, you guys. So you have to be thinking about this number one objective and keep it number one and work on that first. How you can fix this is work on your objective first. Think about what you want the outcome to be when they come to your site. Put yourself in their shoes. Think about what they’re afraid of and what are their objections? When they’re coming there, what is in their head and what are they looking to find? Once you have that firm foundation in place of what the objectives of your site and how you’re gonna fulfill those objectives then you can work on the pretty stuff, then you can work on the design.
#2 Usability matters. The way people use websites matters and you can’t just guess at this stuff. You have to test it out and check it out and see what’s happening. It’s become a priority for me to see how people use websites and what actually works the best, what kinda buttons work the best, what kinda look and feel works the best, how do you tell the story the best, how do they know what to click next the best. I think that most people think that designers do this automatically but they don’t. They just learn design and a lot of them learn print design first and not interactive design. So it’s very, very important that they understand that usability matters and what you can do to fix your usability issues is you can pop into your Google Analytics and you can see the paths that most people are taking. Do research and figure out how people are using your site and if you notice that people are dropping off on a certain page, work on that page and make it better. Even little tweaks will make a big difference in usability.
#3 Uniqueness matters. There’s this really cool scientific thing called the sensory adaptation or neural adaptation, and what it means is that when we are constantly shown something very similar, that our brain starts to basically disregard it. So it’s kinda like how you go noseblind in your own house. Your brain is always trying to save energy or save calories. It’s in survival mode all the time. How this ties back into your website is that when people are seeing websites that constantly look the same or have the same layout, they are disregarding some of the information and they’re skimming right over it. So this is why uniqueness matters and this is why templates don’t work very well especially overused templates. So when these templates get used over and over again, our brains sort of disregard a lot of the information ’cause we’ve seen it all before and that’s why it’s important to be really creative with the way that you do things so that it triggers your brain to notice and the way you can fix this is just think about little details that you can do differently than everyone else. Be careful of not going too far the other direction because if you change your site too much then your brain starts thinking, oh, wow, this is way too much energy. This is way too overwhelming. I’m just gonna shut down. So you wanna strike a balance of something somewhat recognizable but little pops in details that make it different. Head over to http://lovins.co/designermistakes for more.
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