Why Good Website Design is Important

If you are a business website owner then you website is designed, or should be designed to enhance your business. You may be using it to:

Sell products or services directly
capture leads

In either case you will need visitors.

Many website/business owners concentrate entirely on this one facet of their website traffic.

But it is only one part. There are two aspects to website traffic:

Getting it
Keeping it -or converting it

After you've been so successful at getting the traffic what happens to it next. Well some of it just leaves. How many just decide to instantly hit the back button, and why do they.

Your Bounce Rate

When visitors arrive at your site they can do one of two things:

Go deeper into the site or leave.

If they leave without first visiting another page then they have either:

Found what they wanted
Not found what they wanted and didn't think they would

The percentage of visitors who leave without first visiting another page is the called the Bounce rate.

The Bounce rate gives you an indication of how well your site is engaging visitors.

Looks Do Matter

Looks are important. If your site isn't visually appealing then visitors will just turn away. How much of an impact actually surprised me recently, as I thought technical sites were less sensitive to the visual appeal.

However I recently had a design company give my site a quick makeover. Header graphic change, navigation colour change and a little repositioning and my bounce rate improved by a staggering 10%.

So Instead of having to get 10% more traffic I'm keeping 10% more of my existing traffic.

Summary

Although you should always be looking at ways to increase the number of visitors to your site you should not forget to make a good impression and give them what they want.