Five Steps for More Engaging Web Design

Nothing could be worse than spending up your ad budget to drive visitors to your website only to find that they don’t engage.

How can you be sure that your money is well spent? We have some simple steps that you can take in your web design that will help you get the most out of your digital marketing.

Pay Attention to that Hero Banner

Have you ever noticed how on most websites there’s this large section up front and center on the homepage that takes up most, if not all of the screen space before you scroll down the page? That right there is the “hero banner”, and it’s called that because with enough care it can be a real champion for your business.

Every hero banner should include three main parts:

• Introductory Text
• Supporting Imagery
• Your Call to Action

Let’s take a look at an example:

As you can see this hero banner for Intercom simply and clearly includes each piece of the puzzle.

Introductory text could be a single headline, but you can see here that they’ve included an additional line of supporting text. This is a good practice, as it can help to explain your product more quickly and provide more context to your new visitors.

For some hero banners you will see photos used as a background across the width of the screen, but they can also be placed off to the side.

What’s important is that your imagery is selected to support your message. Don’t opt for a certain picture only because it looks pretty. Here, Intercom has chosen a happy illustration to get their point across, which is quite trendy.

The call to action, “start your free trial” cuts straight to the point and handles the potential worry of new customers, ensuring that there is no payment up front. Nice!

Leave Room to Breathe

Often times when it comes down to marketing or selling our products, we have so much to share that we just want to say it all at once. Don’t be too hasty though. While surely there’s plenty for you to show and tell your audience, you need to be careful with how you present your story.

Let’s take a look at two product pages: Google Home vs Amazon Echo.

On one hand, by giving information room to breathe, you can calm the minds of your visitors, place importance on the little things, and entice them to continue scrolling and learn more.

If, on the other hand, you feel the need to provide all the information available at once, you risk your design creating a very real sense of anxiety which may prevent your visitors from engaging.

Remember, whitespace is not wasted space.

Be Mindful with your Colours

We all love things that look pretty. If you’ve ever seen a peacock in person, the complexity of their colours can be quite mesmerizing. Unfortunately for most of us, our websites aren’t peacocks – or at least they shouldn’t be.

When you use colour in your website design, be mindful of its use. Of course, you want to pick some cool colours, but don’t use those colours just because they’re so cool.

Everything in design has a purpose. Be considerate of where you are trying to lead your visitors on the page and what actions you want them to take. Selectively use colour to create focal points and draw attention to things like buttons, testimonials, or products.

Consider Including Video

A key engagement metric that Google uses when ranking your website in search results is “dwell time”, which is the average time that visitors spend on your page. If your business has already had informational videos made, be sure to use them to your advantage by placing these on your page.

As is the very nature of videos, they take time. That time spent by your visitors will be a great boon to your search engine optimization. Easy! (Oh, but be sure not to set that video to autoplay, as that can easily annoy potential customers and may hinder more than it can help.)

Can you Make it Interactive?

One final key to any engaging website design is the joy you can add through interactivity. With simple animations, button hover and click states, sliders, filters, toggles, widgets, and even games, you can easily and effectively delight your visitors, keep them exploring, and boost that “dwell time” even more.

On our own website, we’ve included a bit of fun right on our “About Us” page. Through easy drag and drop interaction, we invite our visitors to play for a moment as they mix and match to guess what each of us love. This is nice, and unusual way to introduce ourselves, and of course that time spent guessing adds just a nudge to our dwell time, creating a positive effect on our SEO.

Wrapping It Up

So there you have it: hero banners, whitespace, mindful colours, interesting videos, and interactivity. Five straightforward steps you can consider if you want to increase engagement for your next website design project.

Do you want to make your next website design more engaging? Could you use some help, or want to know more?

Stop by our marketing agency in Downtown Vancouver and let’s chat! (P.S. We always have chocolate.)