If your website was designed without considering the psychology of your visitors, you may be missing out on big profits in spite of huge traffic volumes! Let me explain...
Believe it or not, but your website has a personality. Just use your imagination for a second and try to compare your website to something: a summer’s day at the beach? a family reunion? a noisy, bustling café? a Buddhist temple? a stale office? If the last one hits home, then your site needs a renovation!
Like human interaction, websites are replete with symbolism and emotion that can have a positive or negative effect on visitors. Sites give off unspoken and sometimes unintentional messages through colour, font and graphics, like gestures, smiles and laughs in face-to-face meetings. It is often those implicit meanings which either turn your visitors away or entice them to stay and start to take in your information.
From the moment they reach your site, you have an average of between 6 and 8 seconds to entice your time-pressed visitors to stay. Visual appeal is undoubtedly more powerful than informative content at this initial stage - text takes more time and effort to interpret, whereas colour and image have instantaneous, subliminal appeal.
Look at colour. Subtly and subconsciously, colour affects our perceptions, emotions, and therefore our behaviour, particularly when already under any kind of pressure. And just imagine the myriad of daily time, money, physical and emotional pressures your visitors might be experiencing as they land on your site!
Through colour you can make a visitor feel welcome, relaxed, and trusting. For example, according to renowned website psychologist, W.L. Wilder, websites that contain different shades of blue tend to be more popular. Why? Because blue represents calm, stability, hope, wisdom and generosity. People inherently trust blue websites faster.
Let’s not forget that in website design, there is such a thing as too much personality. Let’s take our analogy one step further: people who ooze personality can be charismatic, but too much can seriously put you off – you don’t feel like talking to them because they show no interest in you. In the same way, websites that sacrifice interactive, user-centred design for ostentatious, brand or business-centred design can drive large amounts of visitors away.
But honestly, what has all this psych-talk got to do with websites? Psychology helps us understand site user behaviour and harness it to enhance your prospect’s interaction with your website and encourage return visits. What this means to your business is a larger number of enquiries generated from the traffic driven to your website. More enquiries result in more sales, the rest is commentary!
This is why a professional web design firm will not fashion a website “out of the blue”, but will instead conceive a human-centred design that incorporates your corporate values and respects your brand image. So if you think your site has a bit of a personality disorder, let us know and we will give you a free consultation and diagnosis! Send us an email today or call us on 1300 65 25 80.