Give Your Website Design A Persuasive Voice

The wandering savages from centuries ago; the Bard who mesmerized the audience with his words; the Presidents who wooed people and went on to win elections! What’s common with all of them is their power of eloquence that has the ability to affect or impress people.

Mere information, a string of text on a website can only appeal to the intellect, leaving the reader cold.  It’s persuasion that thaws people and impresses ideas upon the listeners.

While the politicians had words in their armory, webmasters have text at their disposal to do the expressing – and website design is powerful.

Persuasive website design comes in all forms and is meant to attract the audience and encourage them to take decisions. Since people mostly operate on auto-pilot; it doesn’t take long for them to decide if they like something or not – all it takes is a snap judgment.

Decisions Change Based On The Stimuli

Don’t we all get influenced by various things around us? Persuasion can put some deliberate thoughts within us, leading us to take an action that we wouldn’t otherwise have taken.

An interesting study called the “Strawberry jam experiment,” was explained in a book, where a psychologist wanted to find out if the preferences for strawberry jam would be the same for students as they are for food experts. When students were asked to sample the different brands of strawberry jam and rank them in order of preference, the results were the same as the food experts. But when another group was asked to not only rank but also explain their decisions with written questionnaires, their choices were totally different.

This shows that in the first study, because nothing was expected of them, people were on autopilot. In the second study, where they had to deliberately think about it, they made different choices.

Our decisions are different based on the way we think and out thinking changes based on the stimuli offered to us.

It is this ability to change a decision, we marketers can tap into through innovative website design.

Action-Prompting Website Design Strategies

We seek clarity in things we do and see. When we visit a website for the first time, we get attracted to a site where everything is clearly laid out and you know where you can find what you’re looking for, in an instant.  Sometimes confusion can put us off and we then back out.

#1. Make It Easy For People To Find Their Way Around

That’s exactly what a majority of people need: they need to find their way around easily.

People expect to understand your site instantly. Give it to them by answering their main question.

• What can I find here and how can it help me?

• New SEO friendly text versus control text.
• Extra call to action buttons versus no extra buttons.
• Large photos on the car versus thumbnails.

Leaving a lot of white space helps highlight the important sections of the website.

#4 Conserve That Attention

There cannot be a section on your website where you can think, “okay, I’ve done my job” and sit and watch. You have to make sure the entire website speaks to the visitor.

You design a beautiful page with all the elements that people find attractive and suddenly there’s a huge wall of text.

While images and photos of people can be an attractive addition to your site, large walls of text is not.

Work on stylizing your text rather than making it bland.  The idea is to make your content easy to read and your text has to be designed for reading. Try and offer novelty in every page.

Which one would attract you from the above image? The one on the right is text designed innovatively.

Research shows that creating all content equal can get boring for the visitors. Keep them completely engaged on your website.

#5 Let Each Page Define A Specific Action

This is really important advice. We’ve read so much about how to attract visitors and keep them engaged.  It is extremely important to understand not to implement everything you’ve read on one single page.

These are ideas for you to use on your website to increase your conversions and land yourself more leads than you can handle.

Optimize your pages using these suggestions smartly. People will take action only when it is clear what they need to do. You have to make it easy for them to take action by being simple and clear.

You Can Do It

Yes, you can! It’s possible to influence people to do something you want them to do. Website design makes a difference. Hundreds of studies proved that it works.

Use the advice here to implement your ideas perfectly and you will end up with excellent conversion rates and a well designed site that keeps people happy and coming back for more.

Are there any websites that stand out to you as great website design?