Can a Catchy Website Design Reduce Bounce Rate? Over the years the purpose of the website has changed: from simply being a page related to interests, to being a virtual storefront for services and consumer products. And as websites have evolved, so have their enemies: where in the past webmasters secretly feared getting no hits on their websites, they now fear a high bounce rate which can exclusively be attributed to inappropriate or bad web design. Let’s take a look at some figures: Statistics indicate that the average successful website intended to sell services has a bounce rate of 40%. Those that sell or provide additional resources aside from services such as software, tutorials and perhaps downloads, have an average bounce rate between 60% and 70%. And the reason why is not hard to figure out: as soon as the site's visitors got what they came for, they'll be closing the window and move on. The exception here is of course consumer websites where people know exactly what they want - they'll come, they’ll buy and they’ll leave, in most cases. So what's the answer? Why focus on the website design instead of marketing? Consider something like a Pay Per Click campaign. You'll spend the money and put in the effort to increase hits to your website, let's say from 10,000 to 40,000 visitors each day, excluding returning visitors. Where sales were initially at 1,000 per day, they are now at 4,000. This may seem like an improvement, but keep in mind that the figures are exactly the same: only 10% of people are buying while 90% are not. It's easy to understand and it also brings to light the importance of a good website design - that which can be done to lower the bounce rate and keep visitors browsing those pages. What can be done? It all depends on what your website currently looks like and the features it has. Here are some important questions you'll need to answer: 1.Is your website attractive and does it promote your product? Take a look from a user's point of view - they're the ones that are (not) buying. 2.Is it easy to navigate around the website? The more intuitive the navigation, the better - people want the info they are looking for at the touch of a button, literally. 3.Are there any pop-up's, too many ads or auto playing video/audio? There's no greater repellant than annoying features. 4.Are there any tools that users can interact with, either indirectly with each other and/or the site owners? Think of polls, questionnaires, surveys, etc. 5.Provide more links to popular pages. 6.Provide more user-relevant pages. 7.Tag clouds - when people don't know exactly know what they want, but the idea is there. These include some of the ideas centered around good website design, but will already make a world of difference when properly employed. On a final note you’ll also have to consider whether your current web designer is in fact the appropriate entity to handle your website †someone predominantly specializing in finance websites may not be so adept at doing pet websites or a page for â€Lilly’s Camp Cookiesâ€.
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