Sometimes a few straightforward website design changes can make an enormous difference, whatever your business goals may be. Do you want to establish yourself as a thought leader? Sell products? Generate leads? Receive donations? Regardless of your immediate or long-term goals, certain design principles remain consistent at all stages of the game. Maybe you’ll think this list is entirely obvious. In fact, we hope you do. Smart design should be universal. But how often have you seen these basic rules get broken? (Does your website break these rules?)
- First impressions matter. A lot.
- Make everything easy to navigate
- Personality plus
- Give visitors a reason to explore
- Share and share alike
Let me give you an example. In October we launched a redesigned website on the Plone CMS for The Century Foundation, a non-profit public policy research institute (aka a “think tank”). TCF has a lot of smart people working there, and they have a mission: TCF wants to be the authoritative progressive voice on US and foreign policy. They strive to “translate” complex issues for interested laypeople. Here is what the homepage looked like when they first approached us for help…
… and the actual content pages were quite similar.
You might think this design looks flat, cluttered and uninviting. We did. And here’s why:
Design Flaws
There were a number of obvious issues, including…
- Subpar first impression. The design was disorganized and inconsistent. A visitor’s first impression should be, “This is a smart, professional, interesting organization!” The old site design did not give that impression.
- Poor organization. Which content was the most important? Who knows? Nothing immediately grabbed your attention and there was no clear prioritization. The site had a ton of fantastic content, but it was not particularly well organized or cross-referenced.
- Not sticky. When you finished reading an article, there was no obvious call-to-action or next step. So, even if I overcame my first impression and somehow found the specific article I was looking for, as soon as I finished, I was gone.
- Lack of personality. A major asset of the Century Foundation is the impressive roster of experts in a number of different policy fields. The website did little to promote these people or their thought leadership.
- Broadcast only. No easy way was provided for site visitors to share content with each other, whether through email or social media. There was no indication of what other site visitors might have found interesting.
- Who is this site for? TCF has a number of different constituent groups, each with different (though sometimes overlapping) interests, including journalists, advocacy groups, bloggers, policy makers and students. The old site was not designed to necessarily appeal to any of them and was instead organized the way TCF was organized: overlapping but non-specific.
For the redesign, the organization had no plan to change its content strategy, nor did we recommend they do so. Their content was, and is, great. But the way that content was organized and packaged was the problem. Here’s what the new homepage looks like.
So, how do our five non-negotiable principles of a well designed website apply?
1. First impressions matter. A lot.
The site design is now cleaner and more intuitive, featuring the content itself as the central, compelling element. TCF has a wonderful ability to articulate complex issues to an educated layperson, and we wanted to make that obvious and inviting. Photography and imagery are also more centrally featured. While there is still plenty of text on the homepage, that text is much less dense than before. As always, a picture is worth a thousand words.
2. Make it easy to navigate
We improved the primary organization of the site’s content to make it easier to browse and search. In perhaps the biggest change, we created a hierarchy of importance on the homepage and all “portal” pages. It’s now clear at a glance which content is considered to be the most emphasized at any given moment.
We also took a “channel” approach, allowing visitors to browse and search within (and subscribe via RSS to) specific areas of interest.
Breadcrumb trails help to orient site visitors and enabled them to quickly navigate up and down the content structure, from a topic to a sub-topic to an individual piece of content.
Of course, better navigation isn’t just helpful to your visitors. It can also help search engines like Google to do a better job of indexing all of your content, leading to increased traffic from search engines.
3. Personality plus
It’s important to show that there are real people behind the thought leadership. TCF made a conscious effort to promote and feature their experts. 
4. Give them a reason to explore
Creating simple but instinctual inter-relationships among various pieces of content entices site visitors to read more than just a single article. Now, when people finish reading one article, they are presented with other articles they might also enjoy. (This is similar to the “upselling” call-to-action that sites like Amazon employ, in which your view or purchase of an item triggers a suggestion of similar items which you may also like.) The more you entice a vistor to explore the site, the stickier your site will be. 
5. Share and share alike
Make content easily shareable via social media. Allow people to see what others find interesting on the site by listing the most popular content. This helps with word-of-mouth and makes site visitors feel more connected with each other, as a community of like-minded participants. 
Results
The website launched in mid-October, and (as I write this) there are currently four weeks’ worth of traffic data available. So, what changed?
- More total visitors. Average daily web traffic (visitor counts) increased 31% in the first four weeks following the website launch compared to the four weeks prior.
- More total page views. More impressively, the average daily number of page views during this same period increased by 108%.
- More pages viewed per visit. The primary reason for the huge increase in page views is that the average visitor viewed 1.61 pages per visit in the four weeks prior to launch, but 2.57 pages per visit in the three weeks since launch.
- Decreased bounce rate. The bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who look at a single page and leave the site) declined from 79.8% to 62.6%.
- Longer visits. The average time-per-visit has increased from 1:10 to 1:57.
- Better SEO. The number of Google indexed pages increased 114%, largely due to the improved information architecture and the attention paid to SEO during the redesign. This has led to a 16% increase in traffic from Google.
As you can see, by sticking to our basic design principles, TCF has already seen remarkable improvement in their core metrics. We’re excited to track their success over the coming months to see how their new design improves their long-term numbers, too. Meanwhile… is your website sticking to these same design principles?
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If you’d like a website (re)designed to help you to achieve your real business goals, drop us a line.
