Within five seconds of landing on your website can your visitors determine what your company does? Can your users easily find your contact page if they need to? Is your layout easy to understand?

In this podcast episode, Sam Carvalho speaks about how to improve your website design in 10 simple steps.





Podcast Sponsor: Brighter Vision



It’s that time of year again!

My friends over at Brighter Vision are once again kicking off the fall season with a month-long digital conference event they call ‘Fall Into Cash’.

For the entire month of September, they’ll be teaming up with the top brands, consultants, and coaches in the mental health industry to provide you with the best advice, tools, content, podcasts, and giveaways; all centered around one main goal – helping you grow your practice and make more money.

Plus, in celebration of the 6th anniversary of ‘Fall Into Cash’, they’re also offering a very special discount exclusively for Practice of the Practice listeners.

From now until the end of the month, they’re offering $20/month off of any website service plan for your whole first year plus no signup fees – that’s a savings of over $200!

For more information and to take advantage of this great offer, head on over to brightervision.com/joe.



In This Podcast



* Have a plan

* Reduce distractions and remove friction

* Add social proof

* Implement calls-to-action

* Use the right stock images

* Organized navigation

* Let your visitors scroll on your homepage

* Don’t be afraid of white space

* Mobile optimization is a must

* Test and iterate



Have a plan

Start by mapping out your customer journey from the first time someone visits your website to the moment they become a client.

When doing this, think about which pages they are going to view, what content they are going to read, and how they may end up converting. Understanding this will help you design a site that helps nurture leads through the sales funnel. (Sam Carvalho)

Interview your clients. Ask if you could have 15-30 minutes of their time to ask a few questions – you could even compensate them with a voucher or gift card.

Afterward, use this data to map out your strategy and identify the key touchpoint of your website or the areas which your users interact with the most.

Throughout these touchpoints, you should be able to map out the emotion, thoughts, goals, pain points, and opportunities each touchpoint needs to evoke. (Sam Carvalho)

Reduce distractions and remove friction

With an audience that only has an attention span of eight seconds, you need to make it abundantly clear what your user will learn on the page they’re viewing and your design must not detract from this. (Sam Carvalho)

Make sure you have consistent brand guidelines you can work from. These brand guidelines should dictate your font styles, colors, imagery, and logo usage. Without this, your brand and message may become lost in the webpage design process.

Avoid too many on-page animations or interactions because it can feel overwhelming and can distract users from reading what is on the page.

Add social proof

If users see impactful testimonials from real people, studies show that your prospects are 58% more likely to buy your service. (Sam Carvalho)

Your testimonials are most powerful when they exude and create trust, and they are usually either in text or video.

For counseling websites, use well-designed and properly incorporated text testimonials.

Implement calls-to-action

The best strategic places to place calls-to-action are: