3 Key Pieces of Advice to Design a High Performance Website

Today, more than 150,000 new websites are created every day around the world. However, only 0, 2% continues successfully online after the first year. This is a key factor to understand that the current complexity in 2013 to achieve the goals with our online business venture is getting higher and higher.

Let’s take a look below at 3 key pieces of advice to design our website and lay the necessary foundations to achieve a high performance on our web business venture:

Advice #1: Structure

We first need to focus, as a basis, on the structure of our future web page. We can achieve this if we first understand how browsers such as Bing, Google or Yahoo read and interpret websites. An URL’s definition (web address) shouldn’t be left at chance. Neither should the definition of a title, sub-title or text within a site.

Let’s see this specific example. Let’s begin with AirBnB, the famous business venture, a benchmark on the Internet that is focused on the temporary renting of properties for tourism.

If we analyze the sub-section of Boston, we can observe that the URL contains key words only. Among them we find the name of the company, that is the base, but after that, we find “locations” to identify the geographic location. Finally, the key word “boston” means that each of our web addresses must contain the right word: “boston.” In this way, in the future, people are going to look up that word in Google and end up finding our site.

Let’s take a look at the website below. Both the title “Neighborhood Guide to BOSTON” and the text “Vision of America’s beginnings etch themselves into the earth of Boston” respect the pattern of insisting that this section is about Boston itself and must be interpreted like this by browsers to bring us new clients.

To learn more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) you can take a look at SEOMOZ, a community that shares videos, articles, and experiences that will help us improve our business venture.

Advice #2: Design for the conversion

Every website has a final goal. The most important thing is to be able to transmit this goal in no more than 5 seconds since the moment the potential client enters into our website. Unfortunately, the reality is that the majority of the websites fail at this point that is essential and of vital importance. To contrast, let’s take a look at this example to see what we SHOULDN’T do. This Latin American website is an online classified ad. Unfortunately, it’s not more than an example of design flooded by publicity that in the eyes of the potential client has lost all of its meaning and final goal.

Let’s see now an example of what you SHOULD do, such as Google Drive. The simplicity and the objective to show the benefits of our tool are above the goal of selling publicity. This, thus, offers an added value to the potential client.

As a conclusion to this point, it is of vital importance to understand that the success or failure of our business venture is based on the client understanding what we offer, how it works and what are the benefits that we offer to our potential clients in as little time as possible before they close the browser and lose that sale.

Advice #3: Learning and repeating

Last but not least important, is to understand that if we want to learn and improve the design of our website, we need to measure absolutely everything and take the necessary time to study these patterns of conversion during both failure and success. It can go from something simple, like improving the conversion by just changing the color and text of a button; up to something more complex, like changing the whole process of a sale generation.

These tools are very useful when implementing this last point successfully online:

• Google Analytics: It helps us know the traffic our website has, and most importantly, understand where it comes from, whether it is from social networks, browsers, referral sites, etc. This tool has the advantage of being free.
• Optimizely: It helps us perform A/B Testing, that is to say, how the conversion of each client on a sale raises or diminishes based on the change/improvement of our website by testing one or more variables.
• Kiss Metrics: It is a very useful tool, similar to Google Analytics with the difference that it not only tells you what happens on our website, but also informs us with extremely interesting details who effectively converted to reach a higher depth on our study. This is a paid tool, but has an initial trial period.

About the Author!

Software Engineer from Catholic University of Córdoba, Cristian Ángel, co-founder of elMejorTrato.com, a start-up focused on the comparison of online credits in Latin America.