Optimize Your Designs
In the digital marketing space, design choices can move your conversion rate up or down depending on which choices you make. An optimized user experience will affect whether or not you get that ever so important click through. If your designs are beautiful, optimized, and reliable, it can be the difference between higher sales conversion and lost opportunities. Follow our guide to start creating tangible results with your designs.
White Space
White space is the name for the extra space around elements of a design that give the eyes visual resting space. Something as simple as breaking up sections of text and adding space between different elements can make all the difference. Adding white space in a design can make it feel light & interactive as opposed to feeling heavy, cramped, and difficult to navigate. This might seem like a simplistic tip to optimize your designs, but whether it’s an email, landing page, infographic, or something in between, white space is the number one thing to consider when it comes to both readability and a modern-looking design.
The Right Amount of Text
It’s far more difficult to implement white space in a design when you have an excess of text that you want to include. When it comes to the text for your designs, it’s vital to remember that most prospects are not going to thoroughly read your content; they’re far more likely to skim it and find what’s relevant to them.
For example, the average user only spends 10-15 seconds looking at an email. This is why it’s vital to optimize your design for these skimming readers, ensuring they see the main points of the content at a glance, and are easily able to choose which sections to read further.
When adding content to your designs remember these simple tips:
- The most engaging content should go at the top of the page
- Keep it short, sweet, and to the point
- If you can parse it down, do it
- Use consistent headings, subheadings, bullet points, and lists to make it skim friendly and add visual hierarchy to the text
- Less is more. Giving just enough information to spike interest but not enough to answer every question can increase the chances of a user clicking “Learn More” and investing themselves further in the content. Keep the email short and enticing and save the details for the landing page!
Form Placement
When designing content for landing pages you’ll often be using forms, as the sole purpose for landing pages should be to convert the page visitors in some way. This means that your form placement is crucial to the landing page.
Always remember to keep your forms as high on the page as possible. Ideally, it should always be above the fold on the page.
Pro Tip: “Above the Fold” is an old newspaper term referring to the content on the front of the newspaper that you can easily see without unfolding it. In web design, it means the content on a webpage that is immediately visible without having to scroll.
Legibility & Readability
Planning for readability and legibility should be at the front of your mind when your designs are being created. Ask yourself as you plan, “Will the text be body copy or headlines?”, “How should the text be divided?”, and “Will I create contrast utilizing size hierarchy or different font combinations?” Leading--the space between lines of text--is another thing that should always be ample in order to accommodate the text to have enough white space to be easily read.
Also, it’s best practice to keep lines of body text 50 - 70 characters wide for optimal readability. If columns of text are too wide, the reader’s eyes will have a hard time focusing on the text, because the line length makes it difficult to gauge where the line starts and ends. Too narrow, and eye will have to travel back too often, breaking the reader’s rhythm and stressing them out.
Call-To-Action Placement
The main CTA of your design should always be highly visible and easy to find. Prospects should never have to search too hard for the interactive parts of your design.
If your CTA is a form as previously mentioned, make sure it’s high on the page, preferably above the fold. If your CTA is a button or a link, make sure it’s a high contrast color and featured prominently, ideally in multiple points throughout the design. We recommend placing CTA buttons at both the top and bottom of your design so users who read all the way to the bottom don’t have to scroll back up to find where they should click.
