9 Words You'll Hear During Your Web Design (Part II)

Hopefully you read about the first four commonly used words in web design Part I (if not, read it here.) Now, let's explore some more vocabulary to get you to expert web-lingo status.  

5. Conversion

A conversion is the result that occurs when your audience completes an action you want them to.

Let's say your main website goal is to get users to subscribe to your monthly newsletter. When someone enters their contact information and hits submit, that would be considered a conversion.

If you want someone to register for an online e-course and they do, that's a conversion. Conversions (or conversion rates) are some of the main goals businesses use to measure success. Depending on your level of conversion (i.e. offering an opt-in download <-- less complex vs. getting them to make an online purchase <-- more complex) it may take a lot of careful planning to ensure the user has all the information they need before deciding to complete that conversion action.

Take Action: It's good to know how many conversions you're getting, but it's even better to know your conversion rate.

A conversion rate is the number of conversions (e.g. a filled out contact form) divided by the number of people who hit your landing page (e.g. page where the contact form lives). The higher the rate, the better, because that means when people see the landing page, they are deciding to complete your action and aren't leaving the page.

Let's go through an example. If you saw in your Google Analytics account that 1000 people hit your landing page, but only 20 people converted, that's a 2% conversion rate. 

20 / 1000 x 100 = 2%

You can do industry research to see what average conversion rates are. How does yours compare?

It takes a lot of ongoing strategizing, planning and testing to reach a high conversion rate, but you can start basic by understanding your audience and their needs, providing strong and useful messaging so they can clearly assess why they should complete your action, and creating a credible brand so they trust that you're the best at what you're doing which could increase the chances they'll complete your action.

6. User Journey

This is a series of steps your user takes as they navigate through your website. 

Since this is an important topic, I've written about it here. You'll understand why it's important to keep the user journey top of mind when creating a website.

7. Site Map

For the context of this blog post, I'll speak to a site map as hierarchy or the list of all pages available on your website that is commonly seen in the footer of websites. 

Should you include a site map in your footer? Well, according to Google, usually the full site map is included in the footer if:

• Your site is really large. 

• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or well not linked to each other. 

• Your site is new and has few external links to it. 

• Your site uses rich media content, is shown in Google News, or uses other sitemaps-compatible annotations

Regardless if you include it in the footer or not, I will always put together a site map, or outline, on paper so my client and I can organize the content, determine where it should live (navigation vs. footer).

For example, on my website I don't feature the FAQs in the main navigation because that information is only important to people who need more detailed information about my specific services before taking their next steps.

Instead it's accessible in the footer or on my services page. It aids in the decision process but it's not something I want people to see front and foremost. 

Take Action: Does your website have a site map? If not, write down all of the pages in your website in the order they appear so you can get a holistic view. Then go through and see if they flow in order, one after another to get your customer to the final step you want them to take.

If you do have a site map, does the flow align with what information your customer will need before converting? If not, spend some time thinking about how you can improve it and understand what your customer needs before making a decision.

Lastly, you can look in your user flow report of Google Analytics to see areas people are dropping off in the conversion funnel to assess if there are issues going from one page, or step, to the next. 

8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results [Moz], like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Search engine optimization is an ongoing effort in order to improve your search engine ranking position.

There are many tactics used to increase the visibility of your website when people search on Google (or Yahoo, Bing) but the basics include URL, meta title, meta description and alt text optimization with keywords. 

Take Action: It's important to set the foundation of your website with SEO. Spend the time going through your website to make sure you have the basics set up. 

9. Mobile Optimization

Moz has a perfect way of putting it: Mobile optimization is the process of ensuring that visitors who access your site from mobile devices have an experience optimized for the device.  

More than 50% of people are accessing the internet on their smartphones, tablets and iPads [Source]. So you'll want your website to work just as well on desktop as all other mobile devices. Can you tell below which one is mobile optimized and which one isn't?

If you guessed the left one (Dropbox.com) is mobile optimized, then you are correct. 

Take Action: When you're thinking of creating a website, make sure the platform , by default, mobile optimizes it. Squarespace and Shopify's platforms are all mobile responsive (meaning they are formatted for mobile devices) and some have options for you to customize the look on mobile. It's important to test your website on different devices to see how they look and if you need to modify anything. Fortunately, Squarespace and Shopify have a feature where you can view your website on the different devices but you can also check out Google's Mobile-Friendly Test site to see how your existing website looks on mobile devices. 

Well, there you have it. What other words do you commonly hear and want to know more about? I'd love to hear in the comments below.