9 Design Elements You Need To Tweak In Order To Kick Ass And Make Money

Did you know that there are mind tricks being played on you when you’re navigating through a well-planned and thoughtfully-designed site? The psychology behind web design is an interesting subject and quite complicated to get into in a singular post, but essentially, every element is strategically placed so that your path is practically predetermined before you even visit.

Crazy, right?

Let me give you a little insight, so if you’re a business owner having a site designed, you can ask your designer dude if he’s taking these things into consideration (and if he’s good, he’s already a few steps ahead of you).

Colors, Colors, Colors

Your website’s color palette can have tremendous influence on your visitors’ emotions and decisions when it comes to reading, clicking, or buying. Additionally, choosing the wrong palette can confuse your visitors, because they intuitively relate certain colors to certain industries.

When designing your site, make sure your palette relates to your industry . If you’re an eco-friendly company focusing on green energy, you obviously want to use prominent shades of green in your design. Have you noticed most healthcare-related sites use light shades, subtle gradients, and their prominent highlight color is usually blue?

Color theorists explain that shades of blue exude calm peacefulness, as well as highlight expertise and knowledge of a topic. That’s exactly what I want in someone who is taking care of my health. No wonder it’s such a common color on health care sites.

Now check out the site above, which is a dental practice. See how the color scheme is visually confusing? You don’t immediately get the feeling that you’re on a dental website until you start reading the text and seeing all the pictures of smiling people.

Bottom line: the color palette needs to complement your message and should be relatable to your industry.

A clear “What We Do” statement

What exactly do you do? What is your product? What service do you provide? More importantly, what will your product do for me?

Your client is concentrated only on himself, and what benefit you are providing to him. So tell him! Let him know, straight up, this is our product and this is the benefit you’ll receive from it… or more directly, this is how our product will solve your problems. BOOM. done.

Let them know they’re not alone

Social proof is a big convincing factor; people implicitly trust something that other people use and are seemingly satisfied with. You don’t want to lie about your popularity or number of users, but definitely highlight this if you have impressive statistics.

If you have a popular product, app, service, or brand, be proud! Spread those tail feathers like a peacock! If there’s a reason to love you, as many others already do, it doesn’t hurt to talk about it.

Show off, but be honest in your boastfulness. Back it up with facts and undeniably awesome service.

Concisely say WHY you’re awesome

In a somewhat-related vein, don’t just say you’re awesome. tell your customers WHY you’re awesome… and more importantly, tell them why they should care about your awesomeness. Show them that your awesomeness helps them in THESE ways… and list them out.

Be concise. Use bullet points. Short sentences work. Get your point across. Few words as possible.

See what I just did there?

Use visual hierarchy to your advantage

Generally, the human brain will think the biggest, most prominent elements are of utmost importance. They will read and look at these things first, and everything else will be secondary.

Which elements should have the highest visual importance? If we’re looking at your front page, probably the statement that expresses the main benefit you provide to your customer should be the biggest and boldest. If on your sales page, the best-selling / most popular / best value product should stand out the most in your product matrix.

On every page, you want your calls to action to remain prominent. This is usually in the form of buttons that seem to jump off the page, either by size or difference in appearance (bolder colors, difference in shape, etc).

Give them a road map

This doesn’t have to be literal (though it could be, if your design called for it,) but you should have a predetermined path for your visitors to take. If you’re selling a product, that could mean taking them from your homepage with your product overview, to a more detailed feature page, to the packages or order page.

This is an overly-simplified example of course, but you catch my drift. Your site needs to have this flow planned out, and with a well-worn path in front of your visitors (along with accompanying road signs, aka calls to action, that provide even more direction) you can increase your chances of them ending up on your site’s sales page. And if you’re a business, your site’s objective is to make sales… right?

Lead them to water (or, the sales page)

… or, the next step in the funnel, or your sales video, or the page that highlights all of your product’s benefits. If you’re selling a product, the main goal of your site is to sell it, as we’ve already determined. If possible, every page should have a way for your customers to get directly to your sales page.

They could make the mental decision to buy at any point along the journey of your predetermined path (see the above step), and you want to give them that off-ramp, that exit that leads directly to the buy page.

Why make them jump through more hoops or hit up each successive page if they just want to hand over their money in exchange for your super awesome product or stellar service? That makes no sense. Make it easier for your customer. Easy easy easy. That’s the name of the (mind) game.

Make the choice for them

On your pricing page, you want to highlight your ideal package, the one you want the most sales from, or the most popular package (depending on how you want to structure your sales page). Highlight it visually, making it stand out from the rest of your packages. This helps your customer avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Consider placement as well, as people tend to scan your site from right to left, top to bottom. By placing your highlighted package first in the list, people will see this first and it may help to influence their choices. Generally though, as long as your ideal package is highlighted in some way, that is often good enough.

Have an awesome product

Really, the clincher here is to have an excellent product that exceeds all expectations. You want a product that does 100% of what it claims, and then some. You want to add value to your already awesome product, if possible. That may mean a few extra consultation calls (on the house), or a follow-up phone meeting before and after you’ve provided your service, or a super awesome help desk system within your site’s members page.

An awesome website with all the appropriate bells and whistles can only do so much to help sell a shitty product. An outstanding product, however, will end up selling itself in the long run. How? Through referrals, word of mouth, people raving out loud about your product, in real life and online. So, in a sentence, an awesome product is your best sales tactic, hands down.

What other influential elements would you include here? Also, what do you think about the ones I’ve mentioned? Let’s talk about it in the comments below!

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