Web Design Ireland

Yes I know, we changed the design for the second time this year. From looking at our statistics I wasn’t happy with the way the site was performing, Bounce rates were high (70 - 80%) - and I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t to do with the design. Some of you may know the following statistics (source SEOMoz)

• 43% of retail sales are to either be influenced by or made on the Internet by 2012
• 83% of business use the Internet to research and find potential vendors
• 75% of users admit to making judgments about the a company’s credibility based on their website’s design

My own thinking was that perhaps our redesign wasn’t allowing text size to be a bit bigger, and therefore readibility was suffering. You may remember we also had a slightly off white colour for our background - I’ve still to change this colour which was ingrained into some of the images kicking around the site. Work in progress for now.

What was encouraging was that I started a redesign on Friday 18th - and here we are with a completely new look in 2 days. The power of CSS design came through in bucketloads this time, this is the first time I’ve reskinned a site I’d put together with XHTML and CSS - and it without doubt was a timesaver.

With the new addition of Google Benchmarking in our analytics, this showed that whilst our traffic was high - our bounce rates were also quite high. From its implementation - our SERP position for our chosen keywords also started to suffer, I have no doubts that these two things are linked - SERP position in Google and a high bounce rate - exposed by Benchmarking to both Google and ourselves, so for those of you who are familiar, implement Google Benchmarking with caution. I also found that social bookmarking sites - whilst fantastic for gaining new backlinks, and promoting link bait, also are more likely to be bouncie. i.e. the visitors bounce quickly by nature, so again be cautious with getting a bit over zealous with this type of traffic.

For those of you who are loyal readers, I’m sorry - you must be wondering whats going on but hopefully this post will serve to explain yet another design change. Let me know whether you prefer this one or the old.