Website Design Vs Conversion - Is There Any Relation?

With all the talk going on in the online world today about conversion and return on investment(ROI) it’s easy to forget a little thing that happens to be the foundation of ROI: web design.

I am not exaggerating when I say without proper design, it is extremely difficult for a website to increase conversion. Having said that I wonder if web designers are aware of any particular design issues which directly improves the conversion rate of a website? After all, ROI is the single most important thing for clients who pay for the project development.

Any thoughts?

 

Given that some of the most used websites in the world haven't really begun as a web-design study, I say no - yes, short-term, design might boost ROI, but for long-term ROI, you would need content, utility, not design, to keep customers coming back, using your site, etc.

Take a look at some of the most used websites in the world: Craigslist, for instance. Not really that much of a design, no? eBay? Granted, they've updated and tweaked their site over years, but basically, it's pretty much the same simple list that they started with. Google? Simplicity is a design choice, of course, and I'm not saying that Google is badly designed (it isn't): it does what it does extremely well, and nobody really cares about how it looks (although there were outcries when they changed their font). Facebook? It's a mess design-wise, but it's still the most popular social media site. Amazon? A real mess, but still they have more money than god. And so on and so forth.

I'm not saying none of these have had the user in mind, or paid any attention to their design: of course they have. I'm just saying that design have never really been the first and foremost priority for these sites, the utility have been - the ROI comes from people continuing to use the sites, even with their quirks and badly designed solutions.

 

1. A web designer will be focused on color schemes font styles and images.
2. A conversion specialist will be interested in how you will engage, attract and convert traffic into sales or leads, what your offer will be and how you can automate your lead follow up system.
3. A web designer will often have a huge number of clients that they build one size fits all websites for.
4. A conversion specialist will develop a customized website and strategy based on your specific needs, and often have a much smaller number of clients that they work with over a long period of time to build a successful online marketing system.

 

If anything that's WHY they have shortcomings that would make most "designers' recoil in horror; either out of the relative simplicity, or the lack of the goofy flashy artsy BS that is NOT actually design.

Those sites all put "content first" as their priority, because that's what people visit websites FOR. PARTICULARLY if they visit the site more than once. All that goofy animated scripttardery, endless pointless bandwidth wasting presentational images, and goofy artsy layout asshattery like parallax design just gets in the way of the user getting to what's important -- the CONTENT.

That's why most of the garbage @karen9999 mentioned typically comes from the artists under the DELUSION they know what design is; simply put most people calling themselves "web designers" don't know the first damned thing about ACTUAL design! They don't know enough about HTML, CSS, Emissive colourspace, Graceful degradation, user experience, or accessibility norms -- aka the underlying engineering principles -- to be designing a blasted thing for anyone!

All you need to do is have a basic understanding of what HTML is for and accessibility norms such as those outlined by the WCAG, and then look at the endless idiotic nube-predating scam artist bullshit at the various template whorehouses such as ThemeForest or TemplateMonster; such sites existing for the sole purpose of taking advantage of people who just don't know any better.

PROPER design takes accessibility and usability into account FIRST, since the entire reason to even have a website is content of value presented to the user in as useful a fashion as possible. That's why REAL designers work from the "content first' perspective where if you're dicking arouind in a paint program pushing pixels around before you even have semantic markup of your content -- or at the very least a realistic facsimile of future content -- then you're doing it all wrong.

Conversions will follow if you make the site useful to as many users as possible with content of value. All the art {expletive omitted} bullshit your typical Photoshop jockey spanks it on the screen with? Not so much. More often than not the "flash over substance" artsy crap slopped into sites are the equivalent of dumping a can of shellac on a pile. No matter how much you polish that knob, the result is just bug excrement on horse manure.

In that way a LOT of these artsy designs are nothing more than trying to hide the fact that the sites in question have no content of value -- THEN when there's nothing of value or the design gets in the way of visitors to the site getting to it, the dipshits who slopped it together sit there wondering why they have no conversions? DERP!!!

You bloat a page out with pointless images, spread out the content so that you can't even find it, use fixed metric (pixel) font-sizes with illegible colour contrasts, and nothing remotely resembling semantic markup, OF COURSE you'll have a crappy return on investment. That's why throwing money at most of the dipshits out there calling themselves "designers" is basically throwing money away!

@karen9999, no offense, but see the train wreck "website design company" in your signature. Poster child for everything I'm talking about in terms of doing it wrong! Broken layout, agonizingly slow loading due to pointless stock images, gibberish HTML, fixed metric fonts, illegible orange text on a white background, excessive overuse of whitespace, 56 separate files spanning 3.6 megabytes, 146k of markup to deliver 6k of plaintext and maybe a dozen content images (basically ten to twelve times the HTML such a simple page should be using), etc, etc... poster child for everything WRONG with web development today. You'd almost think it was sleazed together with turdpress.

@PoPSiCLe has it right; look at Craigslist, Google, e-Bay, and then do some self reflection over just how 'valuable' the efforts of the majority of art {slur omitted} under the DELUSION that they are "designers" really are!

It's like any other type of design such as mechanical design, structural design, electrical design -- you have standards you have to meet, concerns like ergonomics, accessibility, durability, sustainability, user experience... and simply put the majoirty of the dipshits out there calling themselves "designers" (yes, I'm making air quotes with my fingers) pretty much have no clue what any of that means. That's why if you press them about the WCAG a quarter of them will go on the attack to try and discredit it, the remainder responding "What's that then?!?"

 

It's all about the user experience. If the UI/UX isn't good, the user won't return or engage with the site. I agree that well-placed call to actions that get the user's attention along with quick to load and find content will ultimately win the conversion. This is assuming that your site has the content the user was in search for in the first place of course.

 

Yes of course; A creative attractive website makes visitors to connect with it; It means increase in conversion.

 

Look and feel always does matter, web page design is all about that only right?
A look professional looking website should increase conversation ratio with a rich and unique content.
As a UI developer I feel website's every website should be properly designed and attractive and more over it should be User friendly, means user should not feel uncomfortable while accessing the website.

 

NO! Read my bloody post. That's graphic arts. DESIGN is about MORE than what it just looks and feels like, since not everyone is going to get the same looks and feels. Not all users are sighted. Not all users will get your visual style. Not all users are on the same size devices. Not all users on the same size devices have the same resolutions. Not all users have the same level of sightedness if they are sighted at all. Not all users will access the page with the same user-agent or even the same TYPE of user-agent. (A browser is just one of MANY types of UA)

DESIGN takes all of that into account. It's about MORE than "look and feel". Though it most certainly should and even must incorporate it.

A comparison I like to make is Ralph McQuarrie vs. Chip Foose. McQuarrie is responsible for some of the most iconic images in science-fiction and was an insanely talented artist. His art also quite often violated euclidean geometry to the point that little if any of his ideas could be built in the real world and have a chance in hell of holding together in a light breeze.

Chip Foose can draw you a picture of the coolest car you've ever seen, and when he's done he can build it and it'll go down the road straight -- because he knows the mechanical and structural limitations of the medium. You'll probably also have comfy seats -- unlike a sandspeeder.

In web design we have specifications (HTML, CSS), guidelines (WCAG), medium limitations (screen size, resultion, user's font size choice), AND user limitations and capabilities to take into account. Most of the PSD jockeys running around in ignorance calling themselves "designers" are so utterly unaware of the most basic of ANY of that to be "designing" anything. They are ARTISTS, not designers!