7 Website Design Features That Will Increase Profits and Usability

By: David Aston     Topics: Make Money Online     More posts about: Conversion Optimization, Usability

I’m excited to introduce the first of many posts for the all new AwesomeWeb Series here at IncomeDiary!

Each week I’ll ask 6 other internet entrepreneurs a specific question relating to your online success.

At the end of each weekly post, you’ll have an opportunity to vote on the best responses. This helps keep things interesting and of the highest quality.

Between the 7 of us, Josh Dunlop, Brian Moran, Nicholas Tart, Tom Lambert, Dainis Graveris, Michael Dunlop, and myself (David Aston), we’ve gotten over 150 million unique visitors, launched dozens of digital and physical products, had our products viewed over 1 billion times and earned millions of dollars and fans alike.

That said, this first question in the series is an obvious place to start because we’re first introduced to a website visually.

People are often quick to judge you based on your appearance, and the same is true when it comes to website design.

Easy navigation and a visually pleasing layout will help tremendously when it comes to converting your prospects into customers.

7 Design Features Your Website May Be Missing:

1. Members Login Area

Contributed by Josh Dunlop.

One feature I love is actually quite subtle, and that’s membership logins.

4. Email Capture Form

Contributed by Tom Lambert

An Email capture form.

Believe it or not – 90% of the people that visit your website will never do business with you in any capacity.

Capturing email addresses while prospects are on your website gives you a chance to increase those odds and nurture them with high quality content while building a relationship. Your effective frequency will vary but virtually none of your visitors will see your product or service once and be convinced to do business with you.

Adding a simple lead capture form to your website will without a doubt double or triple your effectiveness with minimal effort. Be sure to offer an irresistible lead magnet that attracts the type of people you want to do business with.

For example, if you’re an accountant and want to attract multi-millionaire entrepreneurs write a report along the lines of “7 Costly Mistakes Every Millionaire Entrepreneur Makes When Filing Quarterly Taxes” – making the opt-in offer this specific will help pre-qualify your leads before you ever send them an email.

I recommend a two prong approach: add an email capture form to the sidebar of all of your website posts/pages and an exit popup with the same offer using software like Popup Domination.

5. Threaded Comments and Comment Upvotes

6. Improve Text Readability

7. Make Sure Your Site Has Usability

Contributed by David Aston.

If you’re in the process of establishing a web asset, I invite you to ask yourself a few questions.

Ask yourself WHY you want a website and WHO will be using it.

This is a critical step in the creation process because a natural health website is going to look and feel different than a daily deal eCommerce website.

With each new startup I dedicate an entire wall in my office to outlining my new website schematic.

The navigation bar is typically where I’ll begin because this helps identify your sites main idea. Make it a point to organize the navigation buttons in order of importance (going from top to bottom or left to right).

Once you have the navigation organized in order of importance, figure out what content will be dedicated to each page. Be sure to keep your visitor in mind without overwhelming them with excessive links to “money pages.”

Remember, using colors to reflect your content and site identity goes a long way.

Dark red and bright yellow cause people to take action, blues and greens build trust, and as Michael mentioned, dark text on a light background is a must for readability.

You can discover more about empathizing color psychology in web design here.

Actually, readability’s really important and plays a HUGE role in a websites overall usability.

Be sure to use appropriate fonts (nothing too fancy) and make sure your grandfather and little brother can both read it!

If your visitors read a sentence with any difficulty they’ll simply exit your site and head on over to your competitors.

Prevent this by keeping sentences to 15 words or less and paragraphs around 2 sentences. This maximizes engagement and keeps your sites readability around a 5th grade level.

Remember you’re writing for web users not your university professor.

You can check your website / article readability by using this tool.

These methods helped me find creatively concise ways to emphasize my point and enhance usability. I trust they’ll do the same for you.

Implementation Instructions

No time but want to consume this post? Here it is in 7 quick points.

1. If you have a members area, make the link visible. Consider adding a login widget to your main site.
2. Add headlines to your webpages. Brainstorm headlines that explained both what your webpage does and why people should use it.
3. Make your call to action buttons more visible. Split test different button text.
4. Add an email capture form to the sidebar of all of your website posts/pages and an exit popup with the same offer using software like Popup Domination.
5. Add Threaded Comments and Comment Upvotes to your blog if you want to encourages more interaction between readers.
6. Change your text link styling to blue and underlined. Go over your website and look for what isn’t obvious. Just because you know how to use your website, don’t expect others to experience it the same way
7. Make it a point to organize the navigation buttons in order of how you want people to flow through your website. For example, visit the homepage, visit this page, now go look at this product, buy it, access it, got a problem? contact us.