One of the good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) things about wholesale website redesigns is that the effectiveness of the design is immediately measurable, assuming you have some idea of what you want to measure.

My employer’s new website design — by which I mean a complete structural and visual overhaul — went live in mid–July. One of the targets set around the redevelopment of the website was to generate more enquiries from individuals and organisations about membership.

Long, buried forms equal no enquiries

Previously, we’d expect a handful enquiries a month (sometimes none). The reasons for the previous lack of interest were quite obvious:

• basic contact information wasn’t particularly visible
• links to contact forms were placed below long swathes of copy
• contact forms asked visitors to complete lots of fields and, even worse, make decisions as to what type of membership would be appropriate for them (rather than leave that decision to us)
• these links were placed quite deep within the site’s structure
• content detailed our processes and used our language to label products and ideas

The web developers came up with some simple ideas to make it easy to contact us:

• a join today call to action was placed in the sidebar of every page; this linked to a form
• a contact us link was placed in the top right corner of every page

And I rewrote lots of copy:

• products were labelled with descriptive, audience–friendly terms rather than our own product names; for example, we labelled our customer satisfaction measurement product customer satisfaction measurement rather than ServiceMark
• products were described in terms of how they could benefit customers; we avoided long, procedural descriptions (and where detail was required it was placed further into the site structure)
• each page was given a clear call to action which was placed near the top of the text (note: not in an effort to keep it “above the fold” but in an effort to make it easily scannable)
• the number of form fields was kept to a minimum

The results

It wasn’t really difficult to improve on the old site’s performance: Since launch on July 15 the new site has generated a total of 140 membership enquiries.

What is interesting is where these enquiries came from. The vast majority came from the join today link placed in the sidebar of each page. I think there are several possible explanations for this:

• visitors are essentially lazy. Or, rather, they’ll reach for the easiest means of contacting someone. A sidebar call to action that exists everywhere requires less effort to find and hit
• similarly, visitors don’t bother reading copy in great detail; instead, they’ll scan and then look for the easiest way to respond to what they’ve just read
• visitors react to all sorts of content. So, instead of relying on them to find the section of your website about membership and complete the contact us about membership form (which has generated just 5 enquiries), it’s better to offer them the opportunity to join as a reaction to reading a good blog post, resource or anything they’ve found interesting.
• direct language that promises something in return (i.e. membership) attracts clicks
• the graphic brings attention to the call to action

This isn’t (of course!) to denigrate my own writing efforts: You obviously need to offer a good product and communicate its features clearly in order to generate the desire to click the join now button. And frictionless forms surely help. But it’s interesting to see how design decisions work in the real, measurable world, and how you can infer visitor behaviour from its results.