Within five seconds of landing on your website can your visitors determine what your company does? Can your users easily find your contact page if they need to? Is your layout easy to understand?

In this podcast episode, Sam Carvalho speaks about how to improve your website design in 10 simple steps.

Podcast Sponsor: Brighter Vision

It’s that time of year again!

My friends over at Brighter Vision are once again kicking off the fall season with a month-long digital conference event they call ‘Fall Into Cash’.

For the entire month of September, they’ll be teaming up with the top brands, consultants, and coaches in the mental health industry to provide you with the best advice, tools, content, podcasts, and giveaways; all centered around one main goal – helping you grow your practice and make more money.

Plus, in celebration of the 6th anniversary of ‘Fall Into Cash’, they’re also offering a very special discount exclusively for Practice of the Practice listeners.

From now until the end of the month, they’re offering $20/month off of any website service plan for your whole first year plus no signup fees – that’s a savings of over $200!

For more information and to take advantage of this great offer, head on over to brightervision.com/joe.

Check out these additional resources:

[SAM CARVALHO] Welcome to the Marketing a Practice podcast with me, Sam Carvalho, where you’ll discover everything you need to know about marketing and branding your business. To find out more about how I can help you brand new business visit www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. If you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design. Hi there. Thanks so much for joining me today on the Marketing a Practice Podcast. Today I’m going to be speaking through how you can go about improving your website design. Many of you may have built your website a while back now, and unfortunately, as with most things to do with branding, your website requires constant reevaluation. Every few months you should be asking yourself within five seconds of landing on your website, can your visitors determine what your company does? Could users easily navigate to the contact page if they need to? Is the layout easy to understand and does your website have a low-bounce rate? If you’re finding yourself answering no to these questions, it might be time to take a hard look at the way you’ve been designing and optimizing your website. The last thing you want is to be spending time writing some amazing content on your blog or service pages only for it to go unnoticed due to design floors, navigation issues, confusing layouts, or missed conversion opportunities. [SAM CARVALHO] So here are 10 website tips to ensure that you’re going in the right direction with your redesign and are making sure you aren’t turning any visitors away. Number one is to have a plan. Now that you’ve acknowledged that your site likely needs some improvements, it’s time to work your way backward and create a plan detailing how you’ll tackle them. Start by mapping out your customer journey from the very first time somebody visits your website to the moment that they become a client. When doing this, think about which pages they’re going to view, what content they’re going to read, and how they may end up converting. Understanding this will help you design a site that actually helps nurture leads through the sales funnel. If you’re struggling to compile this data, you can always interview your clients. Ask if you could have 15 to 30 minutes of their time to ask a few questions. You could even offer to compensate them with a $10 Starbucks or Amazon gift card. Then you can use this data to map out your strategy, and this will help you identify the key touchpoints of your website or the areas that your user interacts with the most. Throughout these touchpoints, you should be able to map out the emotion, thoughts, goals, pain points, and opportunities each touchpoint needs to evoke. [SAM CARVALHO] Number two is to remove distractions and reduce friction. Certain elements on your website are going to detract from the value and message you’re trying to convey. Complicated animations, content that’s too long, and stucky website images are just a few examples of this. With an audience that only has an attention span of eight seconds, you need to make it abundantly clear what your user will learn on the page that they’re viewing, and your design must not detract from this. This starts with making sure you have consistent brand guidelines you can work off of. This should detail your font styles, colors, imagery, and logo usage. Without this, it’s very easy for brands to struggle when designing website pages. It’s also important to avoid too many on-page animations or interactions. Think about if you’re scrolling through a page and you see every button pulsing or a section of icons each with their own animation it can feel overwhelming and it can distract you from reading what’s actually on that page. [SAM CARVALHO] Number three is to add social proof. If you shop like most people when you’re on Amazon, chances are you gravitate towards products that contain mostly four to five-star reviews from people who wrote out their experience with that product. In looking at these reviews, we gain trust in the product that it will do what it promises and what we need it to, which in turn pushes us to purchase it. The same effect is applied to your service and website. If users see impactful testimonials from real people, studies show that your prospects are 58% more likely to buy your service. But how should your testimonials visually look so that they effectively create that trust with your users when they see them? You need to think about what format of testimonial you want, either text or video. Historically, video testimonials have been found to be the best. This is because the medium naturally keeps your users’ attention for longer and also builds a stronger human connection by being able to hear voices and see faces of real people. However, I know that this can be tricky within a counseling practice set up. So you also have the option of text testimonials, which when designed and incorporates it properly, will still help build trust with your users. [SAM CARVALHO] Number four is to implement calls to action. Once your visitors land on your website, you need to guide them to the places on your website that will help nurture them to conversion. People are lazy, so you need to make this as easy as possible. Point them in the right directions that they don’t have to struggle to find what they’re looking for. One of the best ways to improve your web design with this in mind is to use strategically placed call-to-actions in areas such as the top right of your navigation, below sections that require action, and at the bottom of your website pages that don’t lose sight of the user journey. The easy thing to do is to inundate users with call-to-actions wherever they go. But if someone is not ready to book with you, then they will likely take no action at all. So instead, you should try to meet your user where they are based on the page that they’re viewing. [SAM CARVALHO] Number five, use the right stock images. The best option here is to use original photography on your website, but if that’s not an option, there are techniques you can use to help pick up the right type of stock photo. The biggest problem with stock photos is that many of the imagery falls into a cliché. What’s more you’ll also find a lot of other websites showcasing the same imagery, which definitely doesn’t help your credibility. So when choosing stock photos tried to stay away from those cheesy images. You know the ones of people high-fiving with over-exaggerated smiles, groups looking at the camera, executives in superhero costumes and groups of suited people jumping in the air. Look instead for photos that depict realistic scenes in wallet environments. This could be people in an office talking over a meeting table in business casual clothing over the shoulder shuts of people typing on a laptop. These are the types of scenes others will start to recognize as legitimate. So look for candid images and ones in real life settings rather than studios. Obviously, if your target audience is not business people, maybe couples, you’ll look for more realistic couple photos and avoid the more typical cheesy ones. Once you’ve found photos that you like, you can run them through TinEye, that’s t-i-n-e-y-e to get an idea of how many people are using that photo on their website. If the numbers are in the thousands, it might be best to use a more uncommon photo. This will add in bringing more realism to your brand and making sure the images match who you are and what your content is explaining. [BRIGHTER VISION] It’s that time of year, again. My friends over at Brighter Vision are once again kicking off the full season with a month-long digital conference event they call Fall Into Cash. For the entire month of September, They’ll be teaming up with the top brands, consultants, and coaches in the mental health industry to provide you with the best advice, tools, content, podcasts and giveaways, all centered around one main goal, helping you grow your practice and make more money. Plus, in celebration of the sixth anniversary of Fall Into Cash, they’re also offering a very special discount exclusively for Practice of the Practice listeners. From now until the end of the month, they’re offering $20 per month off of any website service plan for your whole first year plus no sign-up fees. That’s a saving of over $200. For more information and to take advantage of this great offer, head on over to brightervision.com/joe. [SAM CARVALHO] Number six, organized navigation. When designing your website, navigation is key. It’s essentially the map that displays the core places users can visit. It’s how users can easily dive deeper into areas such as your services, blogs, et cetera. There’s literally nothing worse than a site with a disorganized or confusing navigation. Poor design practices such as overstuffing your navigation using vague or confusing hypertext and lack of organization can make it hard for your visitors to find where they want to go. If users cannot find what they’re looking for, they have no reason to stay on your site. Instead, they will most likely balance and find a competitor that offers a better user experience. So when improving your website’s navigation, it’s important to ensure that your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for. This would include streamlined content, navigation, hierarchy, and responsive design so that the experience doesn’t drastically change on mobile. [SAM CARVALHO] Number seven, let your visitors scroll on your homepage. There was a time when we were wary about making our website pages too long, especially your homepage. This was based on the fear that users were not going to scroll. However, these days, that’s no longer an issue. A 2018 study by the Nielsen Norman Group found that 74% of the viewing time on a website page was spent in the first two screen fulls. So there’s no need to be afraid of creating a more robust below the fold experience. Instead, aim to use your homepage real estate to your advantage. A good rule of thumb is to include three to five sections that help direct new and recurring users to the key areas of your site. What these sections are is up to you, but usually some of the more crucial elements include your value proposition, an introduction video, an overview of your services, and about page, testimonials and or your blog. [SAM CARVALHO] Number eight, don’t be afraid of white space. White space is an essential design element that helps you break up the page and increase readability. Also called negative space, white space refers to the areas around elements on a page that are empty and lacking content or visual elements. White space also plays an important role in the design process and positioning of website elements. While more white space can dictate what sections are separate and guide the eye, less white space can dictate which elements are supposed to be related to one another due to the proximity. [SAM CARVALHO] Number nine, mobile optimization is a must. These days it goes without saying that it’s critical that you take time to optimize your site for mobile. If you don’t already know, 80% of internet users own a smartphone and Google says that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site that they had trouble accessing, and 40% will visit the competitor’s site instead. So ask yourself, why would someone access my website on mobile? What things would they look for and does my experience currently allow them to do those easily? [SAM CARVALHO] Number 10 is to test and iterate. Your website needs to be a living, evolving piece of your company, not static. There is likely always room for improvement. Improving certain areas of your website can aid in improving conversions, time spent on the page and pages per session, but knowing what solution might work best in improving your website is the tough part. This is where running AB tests comes in. Taking two variations of a page and testing them against one another can reveal if certain areas are creating issues for your users. In some cases, your pages may be performing quite well, but contain outdated information. AB testing the page can show you how much of an effect the pages content has on session duration or possibly conversions. In other cases, you may want to see if design updates could affect the page’s performance. Simple changes such as button colors, headers, or refining copy could make incredible differences in your conversion rate. So those are all the tips around how to redesign your website or just improve the user journey or user experience on your website. Taking the time to implement these tips can bring a dramatic change that can help improve the performance, experience and customer conversion rates of your website. I hope this has been valuable and I will see you in the next episode. [SAM CARVALHO] Thanks again to Brighter Vision for sponsoring this episode. Remember that from now until the end of the month, they’re offering $20 per month off of any website service plan for your whole first year plus no sign-up fees. That’s a saving of over $200. For more information and to take advantage of their Fall Into Cash offer, head on over to brightervision.com/joe. Thanks for listening to the Marketing a Practice podcast. If you need help with branding your business, whether it be a new logo, rebrand, or you simply want some print flyer designed head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. If you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design. Finally, please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on iTunes if you like what you’ve heard. Talk to you soon. Marketing a Practice podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice podcast network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic, Imperfect Thriving, or Faith in Practice, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.