Whether you like it or not, first impressions matter. When a visitor lands on your website, they form an impression fairly quickly. Is your site effectively engaging your audience and representing your business? This was the topic of discussion during the lunch hour presentation on Tuesday at the Gravitate in Valley Junction.
In the one hour session, Colleen Kinsey, founder and CEO of Kinseyco, gave key tactics on how to create clarity for your customers, allowing you to effectively engage your audience and represent your business.
Here are some of the main takeaways from the presentation:
Be clear and concise
“Make sure you don’t have your audience hunt for information,” Kinsey said. It should be easily accessible based on what they’re looking for.”
Kinsey recommends using headlines, bullet points, and short easy-to-read paragraphs to allow readers to quickly find the information they’re looking for.
Call to action
A call-to-action (CTA) is an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action. It is, quite literally, a “call” to take an “action.”
“The number one rule of a CTA is to have one,” Kinsey said.
Kinsey says it’s okay to have multiple CTA’s on your website, but make sure to have one that’s primary and prominent and to place it at the top of your website.
Using images correctly
“I see a lot of clients who are balancing between the overuse of images and where images are being underutilized. It’s kind of hard to get that perfect balance.”
Kinsey recommends using images to tell stories and trigger emotions and advises using images that are high-quality and original rather than stock images..
She says that using too many images can be distracting and users won’t know what to focus on. When you have an e-commerce site, however, having more images of the product is always better because people want to know exactly what they’re purchasing.
The trunk test
“There’s no place like home,” Kinsey said. “And that definitely applies to your website.
Being able to quickly and easily get back to the homepage is an important aspect of any website. Kinsey suggests running the trunk test on your site to analyzing how navigable your site is. Here’s how the test works.
Choose one of your pages at random and print it. Place the page an arms length away and you should be able to easily locate the name of the site and logo, the page name you’re on, and the navigation as quickly as possible.
Watch the video below to see Kinsey’s entire presentation.