Grabbing Attention Through Website Design

Building a website is just the beginning of the story when it comes to e-commerce. Once your website has been built, it will have to be maintained, updated, and redesigned to reflect changing trends in the web design industry. It will also need to be carefully formatted in order to hold the attention of your visitors – and that’s where a lot of websites fall down. No matter how much money you’re spending on marketing, you’ll struggle to convert your visitors into sales unless you have a means of holding your visitor’s attention when they arrive.

Time isn’t on your side when it comes to this. A scientific survey that was published in Time Magazine in 2015 revealed that the average human attention span was down to eight seconds. We’ve had another six years of digitization since then, so we can probably work on the assumption that it’s now even shorter than that. That’s how long you have to grab your visitor’s attention. If you don’t do it, they’re likely to move on to the next website. That’s why you need to take visual shortcuts to keep them interested.

A block of text is not going to pass the eight-second test, and nor is a long video. Instead, you need to find “instant hits” that will stimulate your viewer and compel them to invest a little more time in finding out what you have to offer. We know a thing or two about this, and we’re happy to share our top tips with you here!

Offer Guarantees

No matter what kind of product or service you offer, you’ll be able to make guarantees about it. Can you guarantee customer satisfaction or the customer gets a refund? Are you able to guarantee a specific price or specific terms? If so, make a feature out of it. Write the guarantee in as few words as possible. Put it on a stand-out background (preferably green), and make it larger than the rest of the text on your page. If the customer sees an immediate guarantee that they’re going to get something they like, you’re more likely to get their time and money. Guarantees are powerful marketing statements, and they’re yours to use.

Partition Your Text

You’re inevitably going to have to use a lot of text somewhere on your website, even if it isn’t on the homepage. Nobody likes to be faced with a large wall of dull-looking text. Your choice of font and colors can help with this, but breaking things off into sections helps your reader to digest it. We’re doing that right now by using these sub-headings, and it must be working because you’re still here! The most important pieces of text – those that contain your offers or the parts of your service you want to highlight – should have bold outlines and a different background color to everything else. You want these sections to ‘pop’ out of the screen, and it’s within your power to do this if you make intelligent choices about web design.

Focus Only On The Key Features

We get that there are a thousand things that you want your potential customers to know about you, and we also get that you’d like to tell them about all those things as quickly as possible. Just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. Remember that your visitor came to your website looking for something specific, and they’ll go away again if they don’t see it immediately. This should be reflected on your homepage or landing page. If you want to know how the pros do this, check out an online casino website. You could pick almost any of them, and the only thing you’ll find on the first page is row after row of online slots. It’s one of the most competitive industries on the internet, and any company that doesn’t make a point of showcasing their online slots immediately is doomed to failure. The approach works, and it’s the one you should take. Give them what they want to see. The finer details can be stashed “below the fold” or on another page.

If All Else Fails, Use Arrows

The most basic way of drawing someone’s attention to someone is to use an arrow. It might be crude, but it’s effective. If someone draws an arrow on something, you’re hard-wired to look where it’s pointing and see what’s there. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using a big, red arrow on your landing page to draw someone’s attention to the key piece of content that will determine whether they buy anything from you or not. Sometimes, we make the business of web design far too complicated when it doesn’t need to be. Statistics tell us that the same piece of content will perform better when it has an arrow pointing toward it. We’ve been taught that red arrows are important ever since we were children. We can’t break that programming now, so we still follow them as adults. It’s psychology at its most rudimentary.

Design For Phones

The biggest mistake you could make when designing websites in the 2020s is to design your page for a laptop or desktop screen. That isn’t how most people engage in the internet anymore. You might use a computer when you’re at work, but if you’re browsing the net at home, you’re a lot more likely to be using a phone or a tablet. That’s why your design focus should be “mobile first.” It doesn’t matter how perfect it looks on your laptop screen if images push the text around on your phone or the text doesn’t wrap. If anything, the reverse is true. A few imperfections can be tolerated on the desktop version of your site so long as the phone version looks right.

If you’ve read this far, it means this page did a good job of holding your attention. That didn’t happen by accident. Take the basic tools we’ve given to you and apply them to your own site, and you should find that the visitors you’ve worked so hard to attract stick around for longer. With a bit of luck, they might buy something while they’re there.