What turns visitors on/off related to the design of a website?

[SenseiSteve]

Everywhere you look, there’s advice on what works and what doesn’t work in web design (including coding for SEO). While the intent of websites is to convey information, the design of your site weighs heavily whether anyone will actually read your content. If you’re running e-commerce, design becomes critical.

Users spend most of their time on OTHER websites

Their experiences on other websites form their expectations for YOUR website. Take some time to research what others in your industry are posting. Your competitor may market inferior products and services, but still outsell you online. Why? The perceived value of their products and services may be enhanced because of the way they’re presented online (and their SEO/marketing efforts).

Looking for your thoughts on what turns visitors on or off related to web design.

 

[John @ S4]

I think that everyone is going to have personal preferences that are possibly completely different.

Personally I like to have information presented pretty clearly, I don't need everything flying into the page from different angles, doing a twirl before I get to read it, etc. Transitions and animations can be incredibly effective when done subtly though.

Copy should be clear and actually say something instead of being just blah, blah, but at the same time have a personal voice instead of just being standard copy/paste stuff. I notice grammar, spelling, etc. too.

 

[bigredseo]

As @S4 Hosting said, it's going to be the personal preference in many cases.

We're building a site for a client right now. Everything is pretty much done, but they've decided it needs to "pop".

Their suggestion (and implemented solution) is to have the banner roll/rotate from the left (take the entire banner, rotate it 180 deg, and then continue to rotate until it reaches 0). Then make the text fly in from the right. Make the buttons bounce on hover. And the icing on the cake? Turn headings Yellow (HTML yellow, not even an off color yellow), and then use Red, Green, Blue sprinkled into text and headings (again, the straight HTML colors, not an off color).

Me? I wouldn't do any of that. The site was ready to launch. But now the client has access to the site and has decided to add in every possible jquery animation and highlight/bold/italic/color text where they think it's important for users to see. It will be so much overload, people will bounce out of the site.

BUT, at the end of the day, the client wants it to look this way. This is their preference. We gave our opinion, and they want to proceed with their idea

 

[SenseiSteve]

As @S4 Hosting said, it's going to be the personal preference in many cases.

We're building a site for a client right now. Everything is pretty much done, but they've decided it needs to "pop".

Their suggestion (and implemented solution) is to have the banner roll/rotate from the left (take the entire banner, rotate it 180 deg, and then continue to rotate until it reaches 0). Then make the text fly in from the right. Make the buttons bounce on hover. And the icing on the cake? Turn headings Yellow (HTML yellow, not even an off color yellow), and then use Red, Green, Blue sprinkled into text and headings (again, the straight HTML colors, not an off color).

Me? I wouldn't do any of that. The site was ready to launch. But now the client has access to the site and has decided to add in every possible jquery animation and highlight/bold/italic/color text where they think it's important for users to see. It will be so much overload, people will bounce out of the site.

BUT, at the end of the day, the client wants it to look this way. This is their preference. We gave our opinion, and they want to proceed with their idea

I'd had clients like that also (well, maybe not quite that much) and I cringe when I look at what they've done to their site.

 

[bigredseo]

I'd had clients like that also (well, maybe not quite that much) and I cringe when I look at what they've done to their site.

To the point that you remove the "designed by" line? We've had to do that on a few different sites. What we delivered and what they did were two very different things

 

[John @ S4]

To the point that you remove the "designed by" line? We've had to do that on a few different sites. What we delivered and what they did were two very different things

That's an interesting point actually. Do you regularly go back and look at all of the sites that have that line on it, in case they have done something hideous to it?

 

[bigredseo]

That's an interesting point actually. Do you regularly go back and look at all of the sites that have that line on it, in case they have done something hideous to it?

Not regularly, but we have a handful of sites that we are pretty proud of and when people ask for examples of work, we look at the time, see if there was anything major changed, and then provide the live link to the client.

In some cases, we would provide our screenshot of what it used to look like, and then a link to the live site to show just how much control a client has over their own site

Usually, it's a client coming to us and saying, do you have any examples of "landscaping companies" that you've worked with. And we dig up our list on all the landscape companies that we've worked with in the past 3-4 years. Pick from the ones we were most happy with, and then off we go.