Avoid This Critical Website Mistake: Design for the Visitor, Not Yourself

Increase your sales by avoiding this fatal web design mistake.

Designers sometimes get too caught up in making something look pretty without focusing on the user experience or the customer journey. Business owners do the same thing with their own sites, approving pages they like looking at instead of pages a stranger can actually use.

The curse of knowledge

We have the curse of knowledge, knowing where to find the information. So we lay things out in a way that's aesthetically pleasing, even when it's detrimental to the user, who doesn't know where anything is and doesn't share our mental map.

You can't unknow your own business. You know what the acronyms mean, which service matters most, and where the good stuff hides on page three. Your visitor knows none of that. Every design decision you make from your chair is made with information they'll never have.

If you focus on these two perspectives instead, your user experience and interface will be clear.

Two ways to pretend

1. Pretend you have zero knowledge of how the internet works

Unless you're trying to be innovative or show off technology, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel in web design. Present all your information in a very easy to follow format, using the patterns visitors already understand.

Logo top left. Menu where menus live. Phone number where a thumb can hit it. Boring? Completely. But every pattern you reinvent is a small tax on a stranger's patience, and strangers don't pay taxes. They leave.

2. Pretend you have zero information about the product or service

Imagine yourself as a user landing on the website for the first time who doesn't know anything. If you design using the AIDA model, you'll reduce the friction in your customer's journey, leading to more sales or leads.

There's a hands on version of this. Hand your phone to someone who's never seen your site, start a timer, and ask them to figure out what you sell and how to hire you. Don't help. Just watch where they hesitate. Every hesitation is a place real visitors quietly give up.

The AIDA model, quickly

AIDA is a marketing and advertising framework that stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. In order to persuade potential customers, marketers need to grab their attention, create interest in their product or service, generate a desire to own it, and provide a clear call to action.

On a homepage, it plays out in order. Attention is the first screen saying plainly what you do and who for. Interest is proof you're good at it. Desire is the part where the visitor starts picturing their own problem solved. Action is one obvious next step, not five competing buttons.

Run your homepage against those four in order and the weak stage usually jumps out. Most sites grab attention fine, then skip desire entirely and wonder why the button doesn't get clicked.

Miss the last step and the first three were wasted. That clarity is the standard we design to in our web design work, and it connects directly to whether your brand looks consistent and credible when the visitor arrives, which is why your logo and brand consistency matter on the site too.

Thinking about your own logo? Book a free consult with Alchemy Design in Orlando and get an honest read on where it stands.