Vanity and Desire: A Web Designer's Closest Friends

Website visitors are not going to engage with your website, no matter how good your written website content is, unless the design and imagery is right. Vanity and desire are two key concepts that should be in the forefront of your mind when looking at a design that will engage your potential customers.

To make people sit up and take notice of your website content it must appeal to them. Given that people are different and as a result your company may well have different target audience types it is important to find out who the visitor is as soon as possible.

Introducing, then, the concept of Vanity. By providing images or links that clearly identify the type of user you will invite them to click and, as a result, you can immediately serve up content that lists features and benefits of your product and services as it relates to them.

As an example, consider a company that manufacturers widgets. These widgets are available in different sizes and colours in order to appeal to a range of different buyers. If we know that one of our target audience groups are working women that have children then we can provide a suitable image with a caption that says something like "Widgets for Busy Professional Women". This will be clicked on by the appropriate group.

Now you can add the concept of Desire into the mix. Desire works for products and services in the same way that Vanity works for target audience types. Words or, preferably, images (they work even better!) are used to allow the visitor to fetch the product or service that they want.

Our widget maker would show a range of widget pictures, all of which would be clickable to allow the visitor's desire to be shown. Adding the appropriate widget to the basket or getting more information about it should be as simple as possible once the desire has been shown.

A simple way to assess how powerful this last concept is - and as a lesson in bad practice - see how frustrated visitors get when they try to click on an image of a product or service that they want which isn't clickable or does nothing more than give them a larger image of the it.

You may even have been one of them in the not too distant past. When people want to buy, we should let them do so!

If your company needs help with making changes to its website to lever this power of design, vanity and desire then speak to Emerging Innovations and we'll be able to help.