Saturday 16 August 2014

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words!



 Do you remember being a child and seeing your dad read the newspaper or your mom with a novel and saying "How can you read that - there are no pictures?"


It just looked BORING!

I am not the first designer to look a website full of copy and cringe. Visual content matters, perhaps more now that before. Website users are going to give you 20 seconds (or less) to get your point across.

"As users rush through Web pages, they have time to read only a quarter of the text on the pages they actually visit"! Visuals on the other hand are processed 60,000X faster than text by our brains. This means we need to get and hold their attention with visuals.

Having a video on a landing page increases the average page conversion rates by 86%! In fact just having an image breaking up the text on a page has the same conversion rate!

Visual content needs to be at the top of your design list. Items like infographics, videos, memes and straight images add to your design's success.

Another reason to include more visual content in your web design is it makes your site social media friendly. Visual content is easily shareable. In fact, just one month after the introduction of Facebook timeline for brands, visual content -- photos and videos -- saw a 65% increase in engagement. This social engagement is also very important to your business' search engine optimization (SEO), thanks to Google's Hummingbird search logarithm.

To get the most out of your visual content, try the following:

  1. Keep product pictures and videos up-to-date.
  2. Deliver valuable content steadily.
  3. Be creative and make and impression with your social content
  4. Create a platform for customers to contact you
  5. Build relationships with your customers and engage them.
  6. Enable your fans to respond to customer queries as well
  7. Answer all customer questions.

See the graphic right for more visually appealing information (courtesy of Gryffin).

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