When’s the last time you looked at a web design and had an emotional reaction to what you saw? You might say that you’ve never had one, or that it’s been a long time, but in reality you have emotional reactions to all kinds of things throughout your day. Even if the reactions are tiny and almost unconscious, they’re enough to influence your behaviors in real ways, including your buying decisions.
Successful companies understand this well, and that’s what separates an effective web design that works as a lead generator from a forgettable one that doesn’t hold peoples’ attention.
Our Omaha web design team at Big Red SEO will go over the basics of emotion in web design and show you how we can design a website with an emotional impact for your business!
Emotion is Important in Web Design
You might be having a tough time wrapping your mind around just why emotion would be important in web design. After all, the point of your business website is to create leads and generate sales, so why are we off in the weeds talking about namby-pamby feelings? Believe us, talking about how your visitors emotionally process your website has a direct impact on your bottom line.
Appealing to emotion is important in that this is often the most direct yet subtle way to communicate your message. People forget what they’re told all the time, so your verbal message by itself often isn’t enough. They also forget things that happen, so demonstrations of your product or service aren’t enough either. In other words, you can talk til you’re blue in the face and show the value of your product expertly, but until you make a personal connection with your audience you probably won’t see the results you’re looking for.
Emotion is how you build a real and lasting relationship with your customers. It’s helpful to look at things this way—you’re not in business with the end goal of selling a product, but to make your customers’ lives better. That involves knowing how they experience the world, what their needs are, and having a genuine interest in helping them achieve their goals.
Tell a Story with Omaha Web Design
Everybody knows that the best way to get personal with your customers and have them remember you is to tell them a story. People relate to characters and remember how they’ve felt during a story, much more so than when your sales pitch relies solely on logic and statistics.
However, since web design and content creation are two different things, and stories usually fall into the latter realm, you might be scratching your head as to how you can tell a story with your web design that doesn’t rely on words for its impact. In truth, there are a ton of ways to tell your brand’s story using subtle, non-verbal cues.
#1 – Use Pictures to Pull Heartstrings
Most of the time you might think of images as an afterthought to web design, in that they fill up space and just give a visitor something else to look at besides text. If you’re one of those who think of pictures as filler, you’re missing out on an opportunity to create an emotional impact. By using high-quality pictures that do conscious work to supplement your brand’s story, you can begin to create a lasting bond between your business and your customers.
Tip: While pictures are necessary to connect emotionally with visitors, not just any picture will do. For the best Omaha web design, our team at Big Red SEO suggests you use pictures with real people in real situations as often as you can, rather than overly cheesy stock photos that everyone else already uses. Remember, for a picture to make an emotional connection, it has to be real, or at least look a lot like something that’s real.
#2 – Use Color Strategically
Color is undoubtedly one of the best ways for influencing a visitor’s emotional response to your website. As such, it’s very important to use colors strategically to produce the effects you want.
Before anything else, visitors use color first to understand who you are as a company and what you stand for. So before you go and pick a color palette just because it looks pretty or matches your existing logo, you should put some thought into how different colors send different messages. If you need more help choosing the best colors for your website, read Big Red SEO’s article, “Using Color Psychology to Jump Start Your SEO Marketing.”
#3 – What Fonts Say About Your Company
Just like the color palette and the images you use on your website have non-verbal things to say about your company, the font styles you choose also convey messages that influence emotion. You probably understand this implicitly without having to think about it, but it’s good to focus on fonts just the same and use them strategically.
For example, we all know that it’s generally bad practice to use Comic Sans when you want to be taken seriously, but it’s equally bad to choose a “serious” font when you’re trying to convey the opposite emotion. If your business rents bounce houses, in other words, you don’t want the headline font on your website to be Book Antiqua.
Note: If you simply remember to match your website’s font choices to the mood you want to instill in your visitors, you’ll be on the way to quality website design with emotional impact. We’ll add here that this advice applies mainly to headline fonts, because the body text of your website should be crafted for readability first. After all, easy reading goes a long way toward cultivating good feelings!
Contact Big Red SEO at (402) 522-6468!
There are a lot of ways to make sure your Omaha web design is emotionally impactful. We here at Big Red SEO know that quality web design is a big part of the search engine optimization process, and that’s why we specialize in developing web designs that are user- and search engine-friendly! Give our team a call today at (402) 522-6468 and we’ll build your company a website that can reach the top of the search engine results pages.