Deep Dish Website Design Part 2

Deep Dish Website Design Part 2

Start with our Deep Dish Website Design Part 1 and now further improve your website to please customers that go online.

An effective website design is crucial to your company’s digital branding and effective internet marketing strategy. Today’s website acts as an online hub, providing visitors from all channels with the valuable information, credibility, branding, positioning, and persuasive messaging that is crucial to driving more traffic, leads, and sales. How can you know if your website is just limping along or if it is a lead-generating competitive tool to engage with prospects?

Deep Dish Web Redesign Tastes Better and Is More Filling

In part 2 of Deep Dish Website Design, I want to cover the different areas where a website may be looking thin or exhibiting deeper problems. While some of the website design changes are relatively easy to make, others require a deep dish redesign.

Website Design and Usability

Thin Issues Existing in a Current Website Design

• Each page of my product copy is longer than two scrolls (clicks).
• I have more than two animations on my home page.
• I waste a key content block on my home page for a company overview.
• I don’t provide my company address on my Contact Us page.

Deeper Problems Some Website Designs Encounter

• I have different website designs in different areas of my website, due to acquisitions, and mixed platforms.
• My text blocks are wider than 500 pixels, causing eye strain.
• My search bar doesn’t offer advanced search options to filter results.
• I launched my website without conducting at least a rudimentary usability study.

A Website Design’s Information Architecture and Navigation

Thin Issues

• My information architecture replicates the organization hierarchy of my company.
• My navigation is riddled with cliché categories, such as Products, Services, Support and About Us.
• My link styles for active, hover, and visited are not evident to the average web visitor.

Deeper Problems

• I have important information buried three levels deep.
• I don’t use breadcrumbs on interior pages to provide people with a visual navigation trail.
• My secondary navigation appears in different places on different pages.

Content

Thin Issues

• My web visitors have to search to find downloadable content.
• My website copy uses cliches, jargon, and corporate speak.
• I don’t have an active blog.
• I don’t have a plan for keeping fresh content on my website.

Deeper Problems

• My buyer personas are out of date
• My website content is not tailored to my audience segments.
• I don’t have a place on my website where visitors can self-identify themselves according to their job function, company size, or product interest.
• My website design isn’t consistent with my branding.

Social Media

Thin Issues

• My website design doesn’t accommodate an automatic feed for my social media posts.
• It’s difficult for people to share my blog posts, content offers, and news releases.
• My website visitors can’t easily tell which social media channels my company supports.

Deeper Problems

• My social media channels are not consistent with my branding
• Social media channels are not actively updated
• My company pushes information out through social media channels but doesn’t listen.

Lead Generation

Thin Issues

• My forms don’t automatically redirect to thank-you pages.
• I don’t automatically send confirmation emails to administrators or prospects.
• My landing pages ask for too much information from first-time visitors.
• I don’t have calls to action at the bottom of every page.
• I can’t track leads from phone calls.

Deeper Problems

• My website forms send me contact names as emails instead of populating my CRM database.
• I don’t know when someone fills out a form for the 2nd time.
• I can’t prepopulate forms with information I already have.
• I don’t use progressive profiling to gather more information about prospects.
• My landing pages are not optimized with compelling calls to action, keywords or attractive, relevant visuals.
• I don’t use A/B testing to test alternate headlines, copy, offers, and images on critical landing pages.

Search

Thin Issues

• I stuff my footer with keywords.
• My website copy is flawed with multiple H1 heads, or no H1 heads on important pages of my website.
• I have not submitted an updated .xml site map to Google and Bing.

Deeper Problems

• My site is not optimized for key search terms.
• My website content doesn’t provide links to interior pages, or to outside URLs.
• My content is written for search engines rather than web visitors.
• I don’t have nearly enough inbound links.
• My bounce rate is too high.

Technical Issues

Thin Issues

• My website takes more than 20 seconds to load.
• I can’t play videos on my website.
• I can’t protect valuable downloadable content from prying eyes.

Deeper Problems

• My website design doesn’t look good on mobile phones.
• My home page presentation doesn’t work on an iPad.
• My website forms are not integrated with my CRM.
• I don’t have a private portal for file sharing.

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