7 Steps to make your website look good and attract customers
It’s your eyes that buy!
After reading the latest issue of the net effect I have decided to let you all in on a little secret that you can harness to increase the conversions (sales,clicks) on your website and simply to make it appeal to the human eye. To get started lets understand how our eyes work when we are looking at the computer screen.
If you are sitting in an average posture in front of your computer screen. It spans about 20 degrees of your vision. So, you’re only seeing 1/10 of the screen in full resolution, 1/4 of the screen in mid-level resolution, and the rest purely with your peripheral vision (side of your vision).
The fovea area in your eye has a dense concentration of neurons called cones, which perceive fine detail and color. As you move out from the center of the eyeball, cones are traded for receptors called rods, which are sensitive to contrast and motion. Your peripheral vision uses just enough cones to perceive a little bit of color but it’s mainly attuned to contrast. This is the part of your vision that allows you to drive between the lines on the highway.
Although, everything mentioned above is fairly interesting, it is not essential for you to be able to house the power of proper website design. The main thing you should concentrate on when designing your site is your viewer or your customer in this sense. You have to make sure that the users initial scan of the site yields a positive impression and directs ones eyes to the ‘purchase button’.
If you own an e-commerce store and have a category page with a grid of products, images, listings. To make it more ‘eye friendly’ and aid visitors in scanning it more easily you should do the following things.
- Make each product image consistently sized.
- Use similar repeated colors and font styles.
- Use clean lines horizontally and vertically.
- Keep close proximity between product labels and the thumbnails.
Designing with these guidelines in mind provides the peripheral visual system with the right information to plan effective eye movements.
Chunk related items together
Using the CRAP principles (consistency, repetition, alignment, proximity) you should chunk or group all your related information together. For menus it’s critical that you not list out 10 or so items without breaking them up with a heading.
> Adding heading to long navigation menus on websites can produce a 10% gain in conversion and an even more dramatic effect on bounce rate!
Use color smartly
Use contrasting colors, as they will appeal to your readers vision and pop out of the page. However, do not use too many different colors as the effect of the variation decreases.
Break the Grid for Emphasis
The CRAP principles as mentioned above help you create a clean layout that is easily navigable. Yet, if there’s a page element you want to emphasize, breaking the symmetry and alignment can be a powerful way to do so.
You can test the visual design of your site by using stompernets visual scrutinizer.
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Umm, the CRAP principles??? Please get something sorted out about this…