The myth about web design is that it just makes your website ‘look nice’ – and isn’t that subjective, anyway?
The reality is that great design – sometimes just a simple tweak – can make a big difference to your visitors’ perception of your brand as well as their behaviour on site.
This is why it is so important to be able measure the value that great design adds to your website.
Case Study
Back in July, one of our clients, a gym company that we have worked with for several years, offered a weekend discount for new members.
We decided to design a simple banner to promote this on the homepage. Our objectives were: to keep the design consistent with the brand; to emphasise the discount using red as a visual cue; to provide a strong call to action.
Once the design was live on the homepage, we set up event tracking in Google Analytics to measure the number of visitors that signed up to the gym after clicking on the banner. We compared this with a baseline number that signed up without clicking the banner. We found that the banner was almost tripling sign ups!
With this data, it was possible to measure the client’s return on investment and justify the design work.
There are many other ways of measuring ROI in web design. For example, do users engage more with your website following a design change (e.g. view more pages, spend longer on site, bounce less)? Are they more likely to share your content on social media?
However you choose to measure return on investment in web design, decide this before you even think about opening Photoshop!
