Web Design 101: How to Design for Your Goals

Infusioncast with Joshua R. Millage - The #1 Infusionsoft Podcast

Web design in incredibly important to achieving your business goals. If you’re website isn’t in alignment with your goals then you are paying for a pricey business card.

In today’s Web Development Wednesday episode we discuss the importance of website and I show you how I have designed Infusioncast to meet my goal of increasing email sign ups. This is web design 101 and is a primer for future episodes.

Let me know what your website goal is in the comments!

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Joshua Millage: Hi, everyone. Today is Web Development Wednesday and today we’re talking about design.

Speaker 2: How the heck do you use Infusionsoft? How do you make it work for you? Welcome to Infusioncast, the only podcast that shows you the tricks of the trade and teaches you how to be an Infusionsoft expert. Join your host Joshua Millage as he sits down with Infusionsoft pros to hear their stories and experiences making Infusionsoft work for them. Ready? Here’s Joshua.

Joshua Millage: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Web Development Wednesday. Today I have brought back on my business partner over at Codebox, Christopher Badgett. The reason is that I want to have a discussion with Chris because he’s really, really good at helping people think through web design as it equates to their goals. Today is all about how to think about design and really design 101 for your goal.

I’m going to get kind of selfish here, and everyone knows up to this point my goal is increasing our email conversion rate and really focusing on how we can build our email list. That’s really important to Infusioncast so I want to create a site that does that. Chris, let’s warm everyone up before we get into the screencast side of things today. What should we be thinking about when we think about conversion-optimized design?

Chris Badgett: That’s a great question. With any good Web Development decision there’s really a Venn diagram with three bubbles that have to be considered simultaneously. There’s the design goal, the business goal, and the development goal, and there’s this overlapping point where … For example, when you’re thinking about design the best thing to help convert is to have an irresistible offer, which is a business goal. It’s a strategy thing. Then you can make that even more pronounced with good design and you can make it function even better through development. These things are never really in isolation. They’re always connected at those three levels of functionality, design, and business.

Joshua Millage: That’s a great way of think about it. I’ve never thought about it in a Venn diagram but that’s really, really cool. Chris, there’s a lot of different business goals, and ufortunately I wish I could do a Web Development Wednesday episode for everyone, for the guys who don’t have an email conversion goal but have more of a ecommerce goal or some people who are like “I don’t even care about that. I just want a beautiful site that displays information well,” which is a little bit less direct marketing. They just want more of a portfolio. That could be a goal, though. That’s not wrong.

When you’re thinking about it, in those categories I guess, can you give us a little bit of overview? I have some perspectives I can add too but let’s say your goal is not to do anything with conversion, not to build your email list; it’s just to display information. What do you think is the most important thing in that type of website from a design perspective?

Chris Badgett: Just easy access to information. That becomes for me when I hear that question more of a user experience. I want to see the information. I don’t want a lot of distraction. If I want to go deeper or browse out to the side, that user experience needs to be intuitive, easy, and fast.

Joshua Millage: One of the things you said in that scenario that really hit me home a couple months back is the use of negative space and whitespace to make sure that things are easily read, and then utilizing case study sections that dive into different aspects of a business using visuals and graphs and thing to really tell a story. These things are also important in an ecommerce site and in more of a direct marketing-style site that Infusioncast is.

But I think they take a backseat to the call to action in both of those scenarios. I think in a portfolio site you can put that case study or whatever up front as long as the user experience allows people to navigate through that information in a way that helps them engage with the site and not get distracted and run away. Would you agree with that?

Chris Badgett: Absolutely.

Joshua Millage: Cool. Then with an ecommerce site I think one of the things that I’ve learned by working with some incredible ecommerce companies, one of them our client UEP, Ultimate Estate Planner. They’ve got thousands of products. One of the things that really helped them with conversion was the fact that we added a search bar and allowed products to be searched. It seems like well duh, why didn’t you have that before? Their system didn’t allow for that before, so when we added that to their site it really helped with conversion and helped with people accessing information and then creating a product page that was consistent across the site with buy buttons that trained users to look in the same spot regardless of the product page for where to buy. I think that was really helpful there. That’s a different way to think about design there.

I think also on an ecommerce site it’s really important to have verification symbols, security symbols, thing that build trust with the user. What I find interesting in some of the studies that I’ve read show that if those exist or don’t exist, it’s not even about people reading them. It’s just like subconscious like they recognize that they’re there. They’ve trained themselves to recognize the shape, and when the shape’s there they just feel more trust. It’s just really interesting to see how far the internet’s come and what these symbols do to people now. Do you have anything to add there on the ecommerce side of things?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I would say it’s just one of those areas where the business overlaps with the design side. If you have a huge inventory or catalog of products you need very different design than if you’re a client services business or you are a hybrid where you’re client services and you only have three products. That issue of a users being able to navigate through categories of products and search for products in a very crowded store is a totally different problem to solve than a personal brand trying to sell services.

Joshua Millage: Right, absolutely. I’m going to take controls here and now I’m going to dive into the Infusioncast site, because … we’re having some fun … because the Infusioncast site is really geared towards conversion, conversion, conversion, conversion. If everyone’s looking at my screen we have the Infusioncast site and we have really a couple things that people can do. They can either jump into our episodes or they can opt in. They can go over here and click on the right hand side to …

Chris Badgett: Which is a irresistible offer right there.

Joshua Millage: Yeah, we’re solving a big problem with our lead magnet, which is a piece of software which allows you to embed Infusionsoft web forms on your WordPress site. It’s called FusionForms. If you click that a mode will pop up which is known to convert better. It’s called a two-stepped opt in process. Basically the idea here is that when someone clicks this button that’s a small commitment that makes the commitment of entering your email that much easier. They’ve committed once just with that simple click, and so the commitment of giving your email is that much more likely. We’ve tested this and it’s proven to be true a lot. Modal opt insurance are just converting better than the standard opt in process. We find that to be true across pretty much all of our sites right now.

That’s really one of the ways to opt in. Now I have a couple other tools. One of the things from a design perspective here is there’s not a lot going on. I don’t have anything other than this sidebar on the right hand side. You can scroll down and at a certain point you actually get another popup here that says subscribe to Infusioncast. This is a tool that I’m using called SumoMe by the group over at AppSumo. They also have an intelligent popup that will pop up that has a similar call to action. Each and every post in the byline I have another lead box that just allows people to opt in for email updates, which is really cool. Then one of the things I want to share here and see if I can pop it up, SumoMe. I forget the tag there.

I have a heat map program going and that heat map program has been really, really helpful in figuring out how to optimize the design. One of the things I had for a while was a hello bar or a smart bar that was at the top. I was finding that people were not converting on that and not clicking that, so I removed it and now our conversions increased. Now one of the things I’m about to do, because I have some heat mapping tools installed, is I can look at those heat mapping tools and I can see that a lot of people when they come to our site, they click this over here to convert but they also click episodes and they click the about a lot, way more than I ever expected. What am I doing or not doing here? I really don’t have a great call to action or anything that’s allowing me to convert off the episodes page.

The same is true for the about page. There’s no call to action here. People can read about me and what we’re doing but there’s no sign up to be notified or anything like that. What I’m going to do is I’m actually going to put a call to action box and an opt in box in the header areas on both of these pages and then I’ll test that to see if that converts.

I think the big thing with our site at Infusioncast was removing all of the distractions, keeping the color scheme really, really lightweight and very simple to guide people’s eyes to where we wanted them to go to increase conversions. Really the main thing that we wanted people to do here was opt in for our FusionForms web form plugin. I’m going to start running other tests here to AB test that with other options in the side bar, but the other thing I’d like to say, and Chris, tell me if you agree with this, is designing the site to be testable. We have quadrants here. We have the middle section for the content and we have the right sidebar that I can switch a bunch of things out to be tested. We’ve designed for that content there. What do you think about that, Chris? Do you think that’s important?

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. It’s kind of like a natural progression when someone’s doing design and focusing on conversion that when they’re learning things get really cluttered. But then as you become advanced you start becoming much more minimalist, so you start taking things away. Then you’re left, like you said, with these building blocks that you can optimize. You can just switch out that offer in that sidebar or you could change that call to action where people can subscribe the posts, and the things that are on the menu. You only have a few pages to test. You’re prime time for testing.

Joshua Millage: Yeah, which is really, really important. I think the big takeaway is to summarize for people who are wanting to learn about conversion-based design is … I think the biggest point is remove as many distractions as possible and focus on having a really good offer and making that offer stand out on the page. If people can remember the old Infusioncast site, it was horrible with all the different distractions. It converted okay but when we made the switch I saw a 50% … no, like a 65% increase in our conversions over that next month of having that website redesigned. Now I’m going to get testy and start testing like crazy, which will be really, really fun.

Chris, thank you for coming on. Is there any closing thoughts for the crew here on Web Development Wednesday when it comes to conversion-based design?

Chris Badgett: I would just say it’s okay to learn all these things and try all these things, but at the end of the day you want to graduate to becoming a minimalist, and then testing from there. Then also like you said on the about and the episodes page of Infusioncast, it’s important to have an open mind and be surprised by what the heat maps are indicating or what people are actually clicking on, because it may be different or very different from the assumptions you have going into it. That open mind is really important.

Joshua Millage: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you, everyone, for listening to us today on Web Development Wednesday. Tomorrow I’m interviewing another expert, Dan Faggella. He is an amazing thinker and I know that you guys are going to get a lot of information that you can apply to your sales funnels with that interview. Dan is someone who runs a number of different businesses. I think his current business, which is in the martial arts training space of all places, is doing well over $50,000 a month in reoccurring revenue. He talks a lot about how he took it there and what he’s done to make that possible. That should be an amazing interview tomorrow on our Expert Interviews on Thursday.

If you haven’t already gone and downloaded are FusionForms plugin, I would encourage you to do that. We’re getting a lot of great feedback saying “I didn’t know this existed. This has been my biggest pain with Infusionsoft. I haven’t been able to embed my web forms without them looking horrible, and FusionForms really solves that.” Check that out over at Infusioncast.co. You just saw on the webcast where you can click to download that, so go check that out. Thank you for joining us today and we’ll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Infusioncast. Struggling to embed Infusionsoft web forms into your WordPress website? Head over to infusioncast.co and download our free WordPress plugin, FusionForms. FusionForms allows you to easily embed beautiful Infusionsoft forms into any WordPress website with a simple short code. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.

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