I believe that we are designing Digital Conversations. The words and images help people have self-service sales conversations in a safe and anonymous environment.
Websites are 3 Dimensional
Depending on what people search for, they can land at the beginning, the end, or halfway through the buying journey. One of the dimensions is "Time" - where abouts they are in the journey towards a buying decision.
We shape the conversation by matching "The Search" with the right content and onward conversation, through Navigation.
We are looking to accelerate by selling the click to the next piece of information that will help the visitor with their decision.
- We have sidebar navigation that shows instantly what parent, child and sibling pages there are
- We have breadcrumbs to show where people are in our page hierarchy
But navigation is better when visual.
I believe that visual communication conveys more information in a smaller space. It also captures the attention in a way that text doesn't do.
From the visitor's point of view, it is better when able to scan and skim the potential conversation without reading too hard. So when designing pages, we need to look at the sub-pages and decide how to promote them to the visitor.
Free Strategy Session
We take a little time to listen. Where you are, what your plans might be and to show you a little of what people are looking for.
How to sell the click
Part of the job of the page then is to visually 'sell the click' to the pages underneath (or other related subjects).
The content in the parent page needs to make clear it is clickable and encourage the click with arrows or buttons. It might highlight what you will get if you click.
In order to 'sell the click' people want to have a sense of why they should! Lets try and tell them what they will get if they click through to the sub page.
Find out whether you should work with us or not - >>
(someone creative might have made the above more visual and clickable)
So, instead of a paragraph of text, with a blue underlined link for a person's profile, for example, we have a face (very compelling) with a title, and maybe an arrow, which helps people choose.
Even if people don't click, they can browse very quickly and absorb all the information at a summary level without having to read lengthy paragraphs.
Rows as Banners?
I have this idea, that it is an extension of the banner work we are doing.
We have banner ads, promoting the click. We could have 'banner rows' essentially doing the same job.
