6 tested and proven tips for improving your website design

Here are the top six practices you may adopt to attract more visitors and increase your conversions.

Start with a plan

A good website design starts with a good plan. What do you want to appear on your website? What details should your visitors find on your website? If possible, you should create the customer journey from when they land on your website to when they leave and confirm if they will have a good time. 

A good plan will help you create a website design that helps your online visitors. If you are unsure how to design a website in a way in which the design matches your brand’s tone and message, it would be wise to refer to website design inspiration to know the specific techniques that fit your niche and website’s purpose. Make sure you understand your ideal customer journey for a better direction on your website design.

Keep it simple

You probably have lots of information to display to customers through your website. However, you should limit the information you include to avoid having a busy website. Visitors may be confused about finding what they need when the website has lots of information. So to avoid this you can also get help from a professional Woocommerce Agency.

Here are four tips to help you declutter and maintain a simple website design:

• Reduce the number of images or downsize them
• Reduce the number of pages on your websites
• Leave more whitespace on the pages
• Downsize font size

The key is to ensure your website has enough space, the details are easy to see, and the website is easy to navigate.

Include a Call to Action

A call to action instructs your users on what to do next. Since most people visit your website to find the contact section, including the call to action is crucial. Ideally, you should strategically place your call to action so your visitors do not struggle to find it. 

The button should also be short but precise, and you may include brighter colors for visitors to spot quickly. Some terms that you may use on your website as a call to action include:

• Contact us
• Click here
• Download now
• Buy now
• Subscribe here

You should, however, avoid spamming your content with the CTAs to avoid making your content look salesy.

Make your website fast

How long does your site take to load? According to Google, 53% of visitors will readily leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Remember that many online users do not have the luxury of time, and there are many other options to consider when your page is slow. 

If your page takes forever to load, try improving the speed to boost its design and increase conversions and rankings because Google prioritizes sites with fast loading speeds. You can increase your site’s loading speed by downsizing the size of your images and reducing the HTML coding.

Reduce Ads

Website advertising is highly effective; you may consider doing it anytime you have a promotion or marketing project. However, it would be best if you did not overdo it. Your customers might not be impressed by multiple ads popping up because they affect website navigation. 

Too many ads can be a nuisance to your website visitors and may increase bounce rates. If you must use website ads, ensure that they remain at the top or bottom of your content and do not distract the user. Regularly monitor the appearance and performance of your ads to ensure that they do not affect the website design.

Add the right images

Images increase the appeal of your website and provide relevant information when need be. Yet, you should only use the right and relevant photos to boost the appearance and functionality of your website. Here are helpful tips for adding images to your website:

• Ensure the images are relevant to the content
• Use high-resolution images
• Avoid too large or too small images
• Limit your photos – don’t place them in every corner of your website

Stock images are the best if you do not have time to create your own gallery. Organize your photos well so that they can be a valuable addition to your website.

Conclusion

Do not allow the appearance of your website to be a turndown to your online visitors. Review the current look of your website and take the ideal corrective measures. Plus, do not hesitate to seek professional guidance or find inspiration on the best possible appearance of your website according to your niche.

Can the bank repo your car?

This “security” of assets (here, car) comes with auto insurance policies. You are required to have a few auto insurance policies to legally drive the car. While liability insurance is mandatory to have in almost every state to legally drive a car, banks can ask you to get some extra coverage as well.

Coming to the question of repossession, the banks can repo your car if you drive a car without the required auto insurance policies. The banks are within legal grounds to do so and you cannot stop it from happening. If this unfortunate event occurs, it’s crucial to know how to get a repo off your credit report to mitigate the long-term financial impact.

Why do banks repo cars if driven without insurance?

What if someone took your car and started driving without any guarantee to give it back? Or what if they crash it and don’t have a single penny to pay for the repairs? The banks are exactly in this place when they give you a loan for a car. The car is their investment. 

With the high chances of a car accident in which the car will be damaged, banks require a guarantee that the car can be fixed. While banks can repo the car, it is rarely the case. Repossession comes with its costs and hassle. Banks choose a much simpler, easier way.

Insurance policies before getting a vehicle loan

To ensure that their investment is secured, banks require you to get insurance before they approve your vehicle loan. This means that they won’t ask you to get vehicle insurance policies, but they’ll add them automatically to the package. 

All the necessary insurance policies are added to your loan plan, and the insurance premium costs are combined with your loan repayment plan. This ensures that the car is safe while you pay the loan amount back.

Insurance policies required by banks

Banks are not much bothered by your medical treatments or hospitalization expenses. They want to ensure that there is enough money to repair the car. So the policies they require you to have include:

• Liability insurance 
• Collision insurance 
• Comprehensive insurance 
• Guaranteed Assets Protection insurance (occasional)

All the necessary insurance policies are added to your loan plan, and the insurance premium costs are combined with your loan repayment plan. This ensures that the car is safe while you pay the loan amount back.

Liability insurance

Liability insurance is mandatory to have if you want to drive a car legally. Except for a few states, almost every state has made it mandatory, with a minimum coverage limit. Liability insurance covers the cost of medical treatments and property repairs of the other driver involved in a car accident that was caused by you.

Liability insurance is one of the most expensive auto insurance policies and since the minimum coverage limit varies depending on the state, the price of this policy also depends on the state you live in. 

So to make the right purchase, make sure you look for the best car insurance provider at the lowest rates in your state. For example, if you live in California, find out who has the cheapest auto insurance quotes in California and select the most affordable ones.

All the necessary insurance policies are added to your loan plan, and the insurance premium costs are combined with your loan repayment plan. This ensures that the car is safe while you pay the loan amount back.

Collision insurance

A collision damage waiver is perhaps the most important car insurance policy that the banks require you to have. Collision insurance covers the cost of all the repairs needed to fix your car after a road accident. However, a few things must be noted. 

The damages must be from a collision accident (and not when the car was parked). This includes crashing into other cars, buildings, trees, poles, etc. Collision coverage also covers damages due to bad road conditions. Banks require you to have this policy.

Comprehensive coverage

Comprehensive insurance pays for the cost of all the damages to your car while it is parked. It covers damages due to riots, animals, projectiles, vandalism, etc. This policy also covers damages due to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and even volcanic eruptions. 

In case your car gets stolen, comprehensive coverage can be claimed to get the actual cash value of your car. This brings us to the fourth insurance policy the banks require you to get.

The damages must be from a collision accident (and not when the car was parked). This includes crashing into other cars, buildings, trees, poles, etc. Collision coverage also covers damages due to bad road conditions. Banks require you to have this policy.

GAP insurance

GAP stands for Guaranteed Assets Protection and this car insurance policy is to make sure you can pack the loan amount (and interest) back in case your car gets totaled. 

Let’s say the MSRP of your car is $15,000. The loan amount to buy the car would be the same, plus an interest that you need to pay over the years. So the total loan amount goes to $20,000. What if you total the car before the loan amount has been repaid? 

Auto insurance policies will reimburse the actual cash value of the car, which is always lower than the MSRP of the car. This is where GAP insurance comes in. This policy will pay the remaining amount so that you do not have to spend anything from your pocket.

3 top data room providers in the market

Are you looking for the best VDR products on the market? Then be sure to study the full list and make your conclusions. Among the most popular data room providers are:

• iDeals;
• Sharefile;
• Box.

They have high ratings thanks to reviews and a huge customer base. Also, you will learn more about prices, advanced features, and more. Choose the best data rooms and take advantage of the free trial to understand your needs.

iDeals

This platform is well suited for all types of businesses, ranging from small ones. The electronic data room supports the largest number of operating systems, including Linux. There are all types of support, ranging from chat by phone to live rep.

Key data room software features include:

• easy management of files & folders;
• secure fence view;
• group overview reports;
• look & feel customization.

There are more features, but these are the key ones that make the product really special. The price for the pro plan for a month is estimated at $460. There are other plans: for business and enterprise. To get a full-price calculation, you must complete the form indicating your data, email, and company name.

Sharefile

This offer is also suitable for any type of business but does not support Linux OS. Data room software supports many languages and has many different tools for work in its arsenal. Among them are share file content viewer, the view-only file, watermarking, Q&A, data room index, advanced analytics, and others.

The price of this electronic data room depends on the plan. There are four in total. The first – basic – $50, advanced – $80, premium – $122 and virtual data room – $338.

Box

Founded in 2005 in San Francisco this online data room software, accompanies Box’s extensive line of products. The platform positions itself as reliable storage and supports major operating systems. The price starts at $13.50 per month. There are 4 plans in total: Business, Business Plus, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus.

Each plan includes:

• unlimited storage;
• technical support during local business hours;
• built-in integrations with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Slack;
• unlimited e-signatures via web app;
• data loss protection.

What is important to know before buying

Data room vendors regularly compete for a place of honor among competitors. Thanks to this, you have the opportunity to buy the best, as there will always be updates. 

Pay attention to promotions, so you will have more chances to save. Be sure to evaluate the level of trust in the virtual data room providers. If there are a lot of negative reviews, then it is worth considering.

It is important for the user to evaluate the work of the support service before buying a virtual data room. To do this, write something in the chat on the site. Check how quickly you get an answer to an individual question. Also, evaluate the prospects of working in other languages ​​and the possible volume. Remember, choosing a more extensive plan is better if you need to store a lot of information.

How to choose

Be sure to compare virtual data rooms before paying for the plan. Keep in mind that your data must be in a safe place and protected. Ignore false information from unreliable sources on some sites.

Before paying, you should evaluate the work of virtual data rooms yourself. Choose from the list of suitable options and see if there is a free trial option. If yes, then evaluate the prospects of work here yourself.

Don’t choose data rooms with many bad reviews and low ratings. Give preference to those that occupy high positions. Try to find out the prospects of work and understand your goal. If you succeed, you can easily learn more about the useful qualities and those that are unique to specific data room services.

Before choosing, it would be nice to clarify your questions with the support service. Get as much useful information as possible to prevent misunderstandings in the future. Do not forget to clarify what is included in the indicated price and how it can be solved if certain difficulties arise.

The customer journey – from impression to conversion

Understanding the customer’s journey is a prerequisite to journey mapping. 

Thanks to modern technology, consumers have the world at their fingertips. A simple Google search for “running shoes” will generate about four billion results. 

Getting shoppers to land on your homepage is only half the battle. Turning impressions into conversions relies heavily on the customer’s experience. This process is a chronological journey with a beginning and an end. It starts with your business’s initial introduction and ends with a sale. 

On digital platforms and e-commerce sites, the process is similar. When marketing to a typical demographic, the hunt will begin on a search engine. Proper SEO, content quality, and Google Ads are essential elements of your strategy to lure customers to your site.

First impressions are killer

According to Amazon, 88% of online consumers won’t come back to a website with a poor user experience, which, along with web design, creates the first impression of the source.

The same document shows that almost $1.6 trillion is lost due to the bad UX, calling this phenomenon The Trillion Dollar UX Problem. Improving the user experience of your website can increase revenue by almost 900%, according to an example in that Amazon investigation.

First impressions do last, and having a slow website with poor navigation and inadequate responsiveness of the design won’t create high-quality meet-cutes.

Starting your mapping strategy

The customer journey maintains a chronological order with every purchase. Mapping the journey involves the entire customer experience, but it doesn’t end at consumption. It also includes operations that are behind the scenes.

An effective method to start your mapping strategy is first to build a basic user story of how customers will interact with your business. For example, if you own a chain of supermarkets, your user story may look like this:

A family, to provide food for their home, creates a shopping list of groceries they intend to buy. They then drive to the local store, park their car in the store’s parking lot and enter the store. Using their shopping list, the family navigates the aisles picking out the items they have listed. They then go to the check-out, pay for their groceries, bag their groceries, load them into their car, and then head home. The family has successfully satisfied their need to provide food for their home. 

With this example, we have a few questions to ask ourselves to ensure a positive customer experience throughout their journey: 

• Is our supermarket easily accessible and does it offer enough parking space to satisfy customer traffic?
• Are products located in a logical manner and are easy to find?
• Have we conducted an analysis of ‘impulse-buys’ to strategically place them throughout the store, i.e., placing a small display of bananas in the breakfast food aisle or candy at the check-out lines?
• Does our store have express and self-check-out options to accommodate customer purchasing preferences?
• Do we offer payment methods that suit our customers’ needs?
• Could we offer curb-site pickup for customers who are crunched for time?

A successful online retailer will work according to similar guidelines. With a positive customer experience, the buyers will add more to their carts and be prompted to check out. 

Once they provide billing and shipping information, they receive an order confirmation. Email updates with tracking information or newsletters with special offers might prolong the experience, but the customer journey usually ends with receiving the product or service, sometimes referred to in mapping as consumption. 

The online journey of a consumer isn’t limited by what they do on your website, though. It starts with where they find it, what search queries they use, what their search intent is for each query, and whether you have optimized your pages for corresponding keywords.

Online interaction with your brand is crucial when mapping a customer journey, and you can start by understanding the first touch – how your potential customers might be searching for your services. For instance, the tool for keyword research by SE Ranking generates keyword suggestions while showing the demand (search volume) and also the SERP for the term. This way you see what your target audience is looking for, with what intent, and whether your website is relevant for these queries. With this tool, you can get not only crucial information on the key terms you already use but more suitable suggestions highlighting the most popular audience questions (long-tail keywords) and other relevant queries.

Customer journey mapping in three simple steps

The customer’s experience is a sequential procedure that plays out on the front-end of a business. Customer journey mapping provides a chance for companies to put themselves in the public’s shoes in order to reevaluate how they deliver service. 

Mapping aligns expectations and gives companies a fresh perspective solidifying an understanding of the target demographic. All departments will benefit from mapping whether or not they have direct contact with the consumer.

Most journey maps resemble flow charts or timelines with multiple layers to represent various phases. These maps can follow any design or format that works for your company. 

If you’re at a loss of how to start the mapping process, refer to the user-story example above which adds a hint of adventure and excitement to the charts.

Identifying customer activities and emotions

The first step of journey mapping is identifying the customer experience, which you are now familiar with. 

1) Create a timeline that includes all stages of the buying process. It’s important to consider the various activities a customer can take part in while interacting with your company

2) Monitoring all activity that can take place on your platform is an important part of protecting your business from liability issues and inconsistent branding.

3) You also need to analyze consumer emotions. Think about the customer’s experience and how they may feel as they progress through each step of the process. Negative emotions, such as frustration and confusion, lead to low conversion rates. 

A landing page that is too busy or overwhelming, might evoke negative emotions. 

Many marketing teams use chat boxes on homepages. Still, some customers find this annoying, especially if they have to exit the box each time they enter a new tab. 

On a sales floor, a customer might be irritated if employees are too pushy when offering help. Other visitors may look at the same amenity and be glad to receive the assistance.

There are a number of tools that track users’ emotions in their feedback, mentions, etc. These are Talkwalker, Repustate, Lexalytics, and others. Another tool, Hotjar, helps to spot where users bounce – that pages and sections may bring negative emotions to users. 

Companies have to consider the negative emotions buyers may face so that they can be proactive in dealing with dissatisfied customers. Anticipating customer emotion in a journey map can help corporations design models that positively impact people and profits.

Thorough maps help employees deliver consistent and appropriate customer service that is aligned with company standards. Journey maps should take into account the best and worst-case scenarios that might occur during the consumer experience.

Front-end procedures and SEO implementation

Front-end operations are designed to have a positive impact on sales and clientele. These procedures guide the customer’s path from impression to conversion. To create a brilliant front-end flow, consider the channel of communication you will be conducting business through. Also, answer the following questions:

• Are you conducting sales through Facebook Marketplace?
• Do you have retail space for shoppers to visit in person where they will be interacting with sales associates? 
• Are they visiting a landing page and buying directly from your website?

Each of these factors impacts the customer journey.

SEO is especially important at this stage because those tools help generate sales and gather data about first impressions and flow rates. If the journey starts with a search engine, build your site around relevant keywords. 

Pay attention to snippets that appear along with your landing page. These are the buyer’s first impressions of your company. Snippets must contain relevant keywords that would be present in a customer’s search entry. Content on your website should be directly related to keywords as default snippets are generated from site metadata.

Ranking higher in search requires effective strategies that lead to higher SEO scores. Search engine bots have become quite advanced and are specifically designed to filter out sites that offer meaningless or misleading content. Furthermore, bots are now able to analyze how user-friendly a site is, and rank sites accordingly. Aspects such as page load speed, pop-ups, and time spent on your site all contribute to user-friendliness. 

As you see, customer journey mapping helps businesses adopt a better understanding for the consumers they rely on, and combined with SEO, it helps better analyze the demographic they are marketing to. Predicting how conversions and interactions may play out will help you design an effective front-end operation.

Back-end operations and supporting services

Traditionally, shoppers have the luxury of being unaware of back-end processes. With a few clicks and barely a second thought, anyone can simply receive their purchases without thinking about how their orders made their way to them.

E-commerce sites have to deal with digital inquiries, billing, shipping, and returns – all of which happens on the back-end.

When creating this portion of your chart, consider what needs to happen in order to fulfill an order. Supporting services like Shopify, ShipStation, and FedEx assist companies on the back-end of business. 

Maps help employees understand their duties based on where the customer is within their journey. If a customer walked into a retail store to make a return, front-end operations would include conducting the return transaction. Back-end operations would include updating the inventory system, re-shelving the item, or marking it as damaged for the claims department.

Conclusion

Customer journey mapping helps companies optimize the end user’s experience. It establishes a unanimous understanding of the customer, even for those working on the back-end of the business. Don’t mistake the journey for the map. Remember that the customer experience is only one part of the entire diagram. 

Front-end and back-end operations are just as important to flesh out as the buying process. Design a path to customer satisfaction that integrates all aspects of your business model. Leave no employee or impression behind, and prepare to convert in the most effective way possible with a customized customer journey map.