Want Visitors to Stay Longer on your Website? 5 Website Design Tips to Achieve it

If you have succeeded in getting visitors to your website, you will probably consider your SEO campaign a success. But what about the time visitors spend on your website? Shouldn’t your website design be user friendly so that they don’t just click on your web page once and then move on? Don’t you want visitors to go through the information available on your website? Giving information to visitors through your website may be the most vital aspect in the success of your business.

Having said that, making visitors spend time on your website may be one of the toughest tasks to achieve at a time when there are hundreds of thousands of others vying for their attention. With the attention span of internet users shortening by the day, it is important that your website design grabs their attention immediately.

Given below are some tips in order to make visitors explore your site in depth.

• Presentation
  
  The most important element of retaining the attention of a website visitor is the visual one. Make your website design visually very attractive, with an innovative design and great presentation. You have a window of only a few seconds to impress visitors enough to go through the rest of the website. For example, if the landing page of your website is dull and boring, the uninterested user will leave the site. The design and appeal of the landing page convinces the user to either keep browsing the website or leave it in favor of another website. If you do not have an innovative design idea for your website, hire a web design company to do it for you.
  
  
• Keep the Navigation Simple
  
  Even though we are in the 21st century, some things are best simple. Website design is one of them. Sometimes in the haste of being tech savvy, we forget that today’s internet users are time crunched. If it takes too much time to understand the navigation or more than three to four clicks to reach the page of interest, you will lose the visitor. There is no point in having the most interesting content if the visitors face difficulty in site navigation. In short, keep your navigation simple so that the visitors have least trouble in finding information. There are many professional web development services which can help you with a simple website design for easy navigation.
  
  
• Give them what they Want
  
  There is one thing internet users are browsing for: INFORMATION. Hence the most logical thing to do is to give them compelling and interesting information which they are unlikely to find somewhere else. This will require a bit of research on your part as to what your target audience is looking for on the web. For constantly intriguing information, make some updates in your website as often as possible. One way of doing this is attaching a blog to your website. Blogs are an interactive way for give and take of information and go a long way in loyalty amongst visitors of your website.
  
  
• No Annoying Content
  
  Research shows that visitors dislike unwanted and distracting pop ups or advertisements and are more likely to leave the website. They are also least likely to re-visit the website which does so. Most firms which provide website development services are aware of this fact, but you should keep this in mind as well while revamping or developing a new website.
  
  
• Personalize the Site
  
  One way of holding the interest of your targeted visitors is telling a compelling company story. This can be how the company was formed or some interesting fact about it. Stories of rags-to-riches or tall claims are disbelieved by visitors today, so stay away from them. Connecting with the visitors through personalization will make them spend more time on your website.
  

You can also ask your Webmaster to place a Google Analytic code on your site with a funnel, which allow you to see visitors’ navigation on your site. This will help you know whether the visitors like to explore your site or not.

Refer to these tips when you undertake design or re-design for your business website. In order to create a compelling and user friendly website for your business, hire a firm which provides professional web design services and brief them about your requirements in detail.

Why should you ask your website design company for an upfront consulting session?

If you are planning to get a new website designed or the revamp of your existing one, consider this wise man’s tip: “…analyze your website design and development needs BEFORE undertaking the exercise. It’s better to go planned rather than get stuck in the middle of your project unless you got real extra time and money to do so.” Most people have this impression that the website development company will do the analysis themselves and create the website on those lines. You, however, should take a more active participation in determining which aspects of your current website need change. This is important because nobody can understand your website better than you. It’s your own online store/office and you know what works the best for it.

One of the things that you can look for is website design and development consultation that might be a new concept for some, but has been in existence for some time now. It has gained a lot of popularity recently due to the rapid changes in web trends and search engine optimization. It takes into consideration your opinion and requirements and adds industry expertise about the expected trends in the coming times. Your professional web development service provider can take this job; you just need to ask for it before you hand over the project to them.

A website design consultant from your website company first examines the existing site in great detail, making note of the points which work for it and the ones that don’t. He will accordingly plan the design and development of the site in an organized way. For example, if a sub page is buried deep into a website, it will not be found by the search engine crawlers even if the design and content of the page is outstanding. In such a case, the website consultant will decide to reorganize the navigation links in such a way that the sub page is easily available. The industry accepted practice for all your important sub pages is that they be available at maximum 3 clicks.

Asking the visitor for too many clicks to reach their destination sub page can become a big turn off for your site. Content is also an important pull for website visitors and is the most important aspect of a website besides web design. The consultant will hence also examine whether the content of the website needs change. Respective sections can be changed according to his suggestions to include higher density of keywords in your existing content.

You might be wondering whether such trouble is required on your part. Why not directly give the site for revamp to a designer and let him take care of it? Well, for one, the consultation helps not only you, but also the website designer in determining the changes required. After such a thorough examination of the website, the steps to be taken can be easily decided upon and the action plan becomes easier to create and follow. And secondly, if you do not undertake consultation for your website, the new version of the website might have the same disadvantages the older version had.

Go in for consultation for your website and the newer version of it will have much better results. You can consult with the same web design company who will design your website, so it minimizes the efforts on your part. These companies are also aware of the factors to keep in mind to get your website on top search ranking positions and hence they will be the best resource to devise the right plan for your new website or revamp of existing one.