Anyone who has ever been very hands-on with creating a visitor-friendly website knows the time and detail involved. Our updates have been quiet for a while, but none-the-less progress has been steady.
Thank You for the Valuable Input!
We greatly appreciate everyone who has shared their input in creating the home page in our little social design experiment. All your comments were read and carefully considered as we finalized the design.
In trying to make the top-level entrance to Relevance Path easy to understand and navigate, there were many conflicting decisions between simplicity and “more stuff”. Because of some very helpful input, we believe a good balance was achieved that:
- Presents our value proposition quickly and clearly
- Provides options for different styles of users to find information (people who click, search, scan or read)
- Helps visitors quickly find the next click in less than 5 seconds
- Is professional, unique and pleasing to look at.
Changes
You’ll notice two major design differences from our last posting:
- An updated company logo
- Addition of Visual Calls-to-Action (CTA’s)
Logo Design Change
While we liked our original logo, it became increasingly clear that the design presented some challenges for online use. Most notable was the height. In order for the arrows icon (which we very much like – thank you Kriszha) not to be lost at smaller sizes, it has to maintain a minimum and rather large presence.
In vertical mode this made for a lot of extra space in the header and prevented us from using a tagline. A primary goal for design was to keep the most important and relevant content “above the fold”, or in a visitor’s view without scrolling down even if on a smaller laptop screen.
The new horizontally-oriented design helped us achieve our goals and we quite like it. An added benefit was that it presented some new, inherent flexibility for other layouts when needed for other requirements such as a twitter page design. What are your thoughts?
Visual CTA’s and Designing for Conversion
As mentioned previously, we believe that it is necessary to design for both ease-of-use and for different user styles. However, we must always keep in mind that an over-riding goal of a business is to convert new customers in order to stay in business.
Being as we are in the business of Attract and Convert, it also kind of makes sense to move visitors towards conversion opportunities whenever possible.
Hence the addition of the three visual calls-to-action or CTA images of:
- Inbound Marketing Master Plan – an offer to help other businesses create their own Inbound Marketing plan by way of a free pdf download This will take visitors to a landing page with a form to get the download offer. There will be no obligation, but it helps us capture a lead for a potential client who may need assistance with their online marketing.
- Free Website Evaluation – a straight-forward offer that again leads to a landing page that expands on the offer and provides multiple options to contact us.
- We Partner with the Best – our HubSpot Certified Partner logo to provide credibility and give visitors an insight into the best inbound marketing tool on the market.
That pretty much sums up our design process for a visitor-friendly Home Page. Again, thanks to all the useful feedback and please do share your comments below. My next post will profile the design template for mobile devices – riveting stuff!
JP
