Your website sucks.

I’ve come across a lot of website experiences that make me cringe. Terrible layouts, lack of storytelling, buggy features, slow load times, poor SEO, and the worst crime — requiring me to think!

Early on in my career, I read the book ‘Don’t Make Me Think!’ by Steve Krug. In this book, Steve gives an interesting perspective on web design. He consistently hones in on the premise of “don’t make me think”, meaning that when a user comes to your website or app, they should not have to think to find the information they’re looking for. This can be done through a variety of ways, some of which I will be telling you about here shortly.

The worldwide web today is full of incredible information, including this awesome newsletter. 😅

But now more than ever, it’s about delivering information faster.

If I have to spend more than two seconds looking on your website I’m going back to Google or ChatGPT. And I’m sure we can agree that you most likely do the same.

You are an empowered, creative business, and your website should reflect that. Why would you spend all that time on branding, brand strategy, logos, content, and marketing, only to slap together a website and call it a day?

Your website should be an accessory to your brand strategy, and directly reflect your story, your mission, and guide the visitor to the desired outcome — converting visitors into qualified leads!

That is why I’m going to provide you with a couple of pointers to get you started. And as a bonus, I include even more tips to supercharge your online presence in my free Unf[…]ck Your Tech Stack Guide.

Simply reply ‘WEBSITE’ to this email and I’ll send you a copy!

Let’s dive in.

Tell Your Story with Guided Style

Your website should tell a story. Your brand, your mission, what your business offerings are, and more. Beyond this, your UI or “user interface” should have consistency with your branding. To achieve this, I recommend putting together a style guide for your brand. This can be requested to your brand designer if you have one, but a simple style guide can be created easily.

A style guide is a document that contains the following, but can include more depending on how specific you want your brand strategy to be:

Your Color Palette: all of the colors used in your logo/typography. This can also include secondary colors you might use in your marketing such as neutrals for backgrounds or typography, accent colors, and more.

Don’t have a color palette? No worries. I use Coolors.co to make color palettes for projects. It’s easy to use and completely free!

Fonts/Typefaces: Does your logo use Bebas Neue or Avenir Next? Make sure to include what typefaces you use in your branding so that your website can use the same for consistency. If you have the font weights (usually a number like 500 or 700) include those as well.

Logos/Brand Assets: As a developer, I need your logo and brand assets to use throughout the site. SVG’s (Scalable Vector Graphic) are preferred here, as they can be resized without losing quality, which makes for better responsive design (how your website looks on a phone vs a laptop). This is usually in the form of a downloadable folder via Google Drive link.

This style guide can be used for more than just websites, so it is definitely great to have for everything related to brand design, marketing and strategy.

User Flows that Get Results

Along with your story, we have another goal to achieve here — converting new visitors into qualified leads.

Take a second and think about your ideal customer. How would you convert them? Would you start with telling them about your services? Or maybe you want to build some trust first with some testimonials from happy clients?

Once you have that identified, figure out how you can convey that on a webpage.

For example: A business that sells pizza may see more benefit from simply having some testimonials close to the “hero” section of their website with a call-to-action right away.

Someone like me, a freelance developer, needs to earn more trust from the visitor. So on my website I briefly tell the visitor what I do, guide them to look at past projects, present the services I offer, and then the social proof with call-to-actions strategically placed to encourage the visitor to connect with me.

As you can see, the user flow can be as detailed as you want, but it should ultimately guide them to the call-to-action, without having to think. Which leads me to my last point.

Don’t Make Me Think!

When I visit your website, is it easy to tell where to find information? How do I navigate the site? How do I buy a product?

Try to find the navigation on each of these Starbucks webpages. Which one is easier to find?

These are all questions I should not be asking when visiting your website. Along with the user flow you just crafted, your visitors should not have to think about how to find information on your site. Although I’m all for creativity and innovation, we are creatures of habit — meaning we expect navigation to be at the top of the page, and relevant content to be displayed quickly and easily consumable. Leave the long paragraphs at home.

I hope these tips help breathe new life into your website and help further position your brand strategy. And if you’re still unsure of the best strategy to building your website, I am a web developer that helps businesses get the most out of their business technology.

 Click here to schedule a call with me, where I will audit your website for free and come up with an action plan to transform your website and get you more qualified leads.

Don’t make me think — there’s enough going on up there already.

Paps.