Since the Internet explosion, the drive of website owners has been to increase traffic to their website. For some, more traffic means more money because of advertisement or marketing of certain products. For others, it means that your website is popular and thus validates your hard work. No matter the situation, traffic has been the most-sought after goal. The more traffic your website has, the easier it will be to make money, spread your ideas, or connect with other people.
There are countless ways to increase viewership, including RSS feeds, market on social media, or hold contests with prizes to draw in new viewers. All of those ideas require constant work, but so many people could increase their viewership 300% just by improving their web design. While a great web design will increase your traffic significantly, the opposite is true as well, a poor website will decrease your traffic. This is not a project for you to find the cheapest solution or skimp on costs. Find a web designer that has proven themselves and negotiate a fair cost. If this project is worth pursuing, it is worth pursuing correctly.
While a great web design will increase your traffic significantly, the opposite is true as well, a poor website will decrease your traffic.
Look at our website statistics pictured above. A week and half ago, we changed the website structure because our vision for the site had gone a new direction. In that time, our daily viewership has increased more than 300%. Nothing else has changed, we market the same amount, our posts are the same length, and the content has not varied (excluding the baby announcement, but that was not factored into the statistics).
So what can you do to improve your web design and thus increase your web traffic? Here is a list of a few things:
- Rethink the purpose of the site and feature that aspect on your homepage.
- Pick a more vibrant set of colors that work better for your product or site.
- Make sure the focus is on your content and not advertisements or lesser parts of the site.
- Make sure your web design works in all popular browsers and platforms
- Write good content
- Quit being cheap and higher a web designer to improve the flow
- Use a heatmap application to know where your visitors are going.
- Have better site navigation that links to other parts of your site.
- Make sure your graphic sizes are low for quicker load times
- Use whitespace well
- Do not ignore the power of “above-the-fold”
There is no “magical” strategy to get you millions of views a day short of lots of money in investments or the perfect marketing platform (again, more money). But if you address the basics of your web design, you can optimize your traffic flow and hopefully earn a few extra bucks.
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