Great web design is sometimes unfairly brushed off as a luxury only huge brands can afford to carry out successfully. Companies with generous design and marketing budgets usually do take full advantage of their options and provide users with great online experiences.
However, although it may seem like this is a major league game, even simple web design tweaks and investments can result in huge payoffs. In this article, we’ll explore how several companies managed to increase their revenue and conversions by implementing some of the current web design trends. The following case studies and tips based on research compiled by DesignAdvisor help illustrate the power of good web design, and how any business can wield it.
Make your site easy to navigate
The percentage of sales lost because customers can’t find what they require on a website goes as high as 50%. Nowadays, users online are accustomed to finding what they need quickly and easily so navigability is key. By improving their site’s architecture and ease of navigation, Botanica managed to increase sessions by 78%, page views by 102% and organic search traffic by 55%.
Provide easy access to information
A site’s search functionalities can help users find what they need in case they are unable to do so merely by browsing. If a search function in not implemented correctly or worse, missing entirely, the user’s overall perception of a website and the quality of their experience is likely to be negatively impacted. 60% of the time, when users can’t find information it’s due to poor search functionalities.
In the case of Volleyball BC, the sports site managed to increase user engagement by improving their search options. They implemented an advanced filtering system for searching results by game and team as well as searching events by location. As a result, the site saw a jump of 28% in visits and an increase in social referrals of over 500%.
Don’t forget about mobile devices
As more users migrate from laptops and desktops to mobile phones, companies failing to update their design to enable responsiveness to mobile devices are bound to see some adverse effects. Almost half of all users will take the fact that a website does not perform well on their phone as a sign that the business associated with it just doesn’t care enough.
HMT updated their site to fit mobile specifications and increased their monthly revenue by 159%; merely by introducing responsive web design, time spent on the site increased by 60%.
Speed up
Almost 50% of users think that a site should take no more than two seconds to load, and investing in meeting these expectations can have some very positive outcomes for a business. Allowing users to get to where they want to go faster helps you sell products and services. Shopzilla increased its conversion rate by 7-12% by simply getting their site to load 5 seconds faster. These small tweaks can clearly have significant impact on your business.
Check out plenty more trends, case studies and resources in the infographic below.
Movies and TV shows tend to use real food when they can, but there are a number of times when they need something fake. We spoke with two fake food artists who specialize in making custom, inedible treats for restaurants, trade shows, and Hollywood. Here’s how fake food props are made to look so delicious.
Box explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping on moving surfaces. The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera. Bot & Dolly produced this work to serve as both an artistic statement and technical demonstration. It is the culmination of multiple technologies, including large scale robotics, projection mapping, and software engineering. We believe this methodology has tremendous potential to radically transform theatrical presentations, and define new genres of expression.
The fields of graphic design and semiotics are inextricably linked. In this way, the first logo creators were most likely the ancient Egyptians, who designed images to convey socio-cultural values and established visual codes of representation. But as the industrial revolution began to give rise to consumer culture as we know it, logo design remained mostly utilitarian; images that represented brands often depicted either the product, the service, or something related to its manufacture, such as a factory.
Then came Paul Rand with his iconic rendering of the IBM logo in 1956. Many design historians see this as the definitive turning point in logo design. Shortly thereafter, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar founded a design firm that would take things one step further.
Diana Smith makes web images unlike any you’ve probably seen before. That’s because when you’re looking at one of the user interface designer’s creations, you’re not looking at flat pixel data fetched from a server—you’re looking at pure code, rendered live before your very eyes.
Smith’s “Pure CSS Francine,” an elaborate code-drawing in the style of an 1800s oil painting, caused web developers on Twitter to have a meltdown this week. The work was not drawn with a tablet, or a mouse, or even using illustration software. Instead, Smith coded every element by hand in HTML and CSS, computer languages that tell your browser how to display web pages. This means that there is no “image” to save as a file when you view Pure CSS Francine on the web, but you can screenshot it or download the code and play around with it yourself.
