Better Website Usability

Last week I watched a four video series from Eben Pagan called “Modern Marketing.” I took a lot out of watching these videos and immediately started implementing some of his ideas into my design.

In a couple of the videos he is critiquing websites of the attendees. There were several clear messages that got through to me:

1. Your message must be very clear. If a visitor arrives at your site and doesn’t immediately know what it is about, you haven’t done your job right.
2. You need to tap into a pain or hurt that your visitor has. In the gambling niche (where I mainly work) I think this is underdone. Instead of saying why a poker room is so good, tell the visitor what problem it will solve. Tell them the hurt it will heal. Tap into their emotions and give them a solution to their problem.
3. Design should be simple. It has to be easy to use. Many affiliates are bemused at how someone could possibly get lost. Some of the ugliest sites make the most money.

I took down some notes on what I leaned from Pagan. I respect this guy a lot so that is probably why I took immediate action. Here are the main points he raised about website design and the characteristics they should have:

• 2 font types – 3 maximum
• 2 font sizes – 3 maximum
• 2 colours – 3 maximum
• 2 alignments – align hard left and justify left. He stressed that websites almost always should have hard left alignments.
• 1 dominant visual effect – This is a big one. I have actually done a little bit of a redesign of my Australian Gambling homepage. I changed my side navigation color along with my news section color. It means that the panels in the middle have a strong dominant effect. Visitors should be drawn to one image element.
• Clear visual hierarchy
• Follow natural reading gravity. A reader naturally reads from top to bottom and left to right.
• Simplify and streamline. Make everything quicker. It should be simple for a visitor to find what they want fast and easily. Put a sign up button or download now in front of their faces. Write simple instructions, let them know what they want.
• Big, bold headlines.
• Use sub-headlines.
• Bulleted lists. In Dan McCarthy’s Advanced copywriting (which I highly recommend) he says this is the single most important copywriting feature. Hence, why you see me writing in bulleted lists now.
• Blocks of text. He says long, narrow pages are much easier to read. If you break them up correctly, they should be easy to scan.
• Include captions with images. This is a simple way to communicate with the reader.
• A formula that he preaches that I find that helps me is: simplicity, repetition, contrast, alignment, thirds.
• Balance. The rule of thirds that I just alluded to is included in this. A page must be balanced and the rule of thirds helps with that in regards to website usability. An image up the top, then a headline, the a block of text is a perfect example of the rule of thirds. A balanced page will “feel” right.
• Themes. No he is not talking about the latest WordPress theme. He is talking about sticking to the theme of your site. If you write in a particular way, or have a certain design feature, continue with it. It should be consistent throughout the whole site.
• Clarity, not beauty. Do not ever sacrifice the usability of an affiliate website for aesthetics.
• Emotional needs. This is what I alluded to earlier. You need to find an emotional need and give them what they desire. Human beings are not logical, there will always be a unique reason for them wanting to buy something.

If you haven’t already been exposed to Eben Pagan then I highly recommend you do so. Some of his courses are simply superb, and he brings marketing strategies that go well beyond the thinking of others. I am currently doing week one of his “Wake Up Productive” course and it is amazing so far (had 4 intro videos).

He has sold millions of dollars worth of affiliate products so he knows what he’s talking about. I don’t want you to take everything he says as gospel, but he gave me a level of thinking I had never encountered before.

If you are a poker affiliate I suggest you take a look at Randy Ray’s poker website usability post.

I urge you to read as much as you can on Jakob Nielsen’s UseIt website. There are several other great resources to find if you just do a regular Google search on website usability.

I find this part of being an affiliate quite fascinating. It’s interesting to see how something that I easily overlook can have a dramatic effect on how my website functions. This week I have added bread crumbs, increased my font size to 14px and changed font to Verdana. In addition to that all my links are blue and underlined. Visited links are purple and active links are yellow. These kind of things I never took much notice of before.

Another factor I have heard quite a lot of people talk about in the past is the color of call to actions. Sign up buttons being green, rather than red because it looks safer and more trustworthy, even put them in the right frame of mind?

I will have to do more testing and report back with my findings. In the mean time you can split test yourself by installing programs that make videos of your visitor’s actions. Graham Rowlands wrote a great article on the best programs to use in his article on tools to track your visitors.

As always, I love to hear your feedback on anything that I write about. What do you think about the design changes on this blog?