Focusing Your Call to Action

In the most general sense, a call to action is a way to ask your readers to do something. This could be purchasing something, signing up for something, or donating something, or anything else that asks the users to take an action. All too often, though, we see websites which do not utilize their call to action in the right way, making it fairly useless. There are many ways that you can make your call to action something that truly helps you to reach your goals with your website.

Great Ideas

In the popular movie Field of Dreams, the main character hears a voice whisper “if you build it, they will come”. When it comes to a call to action, you’re basically doing the same thing. You need to fill the need of the user before they’ll be willing to complete the call to action. One of the best ways to do this is to explain to the user what they’re going to be doing if they complete your call to action. For example, if they complete your call to action, will they be getting a newsletter, or some sort of a product? If your client knows what they’ll be getting when they do as you ask, they’ll be much more likely to do as you want them to do.

Sometimes you need to offer a little incentive to get them to do as you wish. Incentives can be a variety of things, including discounts, small gifts, or even entry into a competition where they can win something. By offering the user something, you’re giving them a good reason to want to do as you ask them to do, giving you both what you want out of the deal.

One thing to make sure that you do is to avoid using too many calls to action. If you have too many on the site, your users may get confused, or may feel as though you’re asking too much from them. This is a surefire reason for them to leave or to ignore everything that you’re asking from them. When you’re planning out the site, make sure that you only have a few calls to action instead of having dozens of them. This will encourage your customers to do what you’d like them to do and will give you a greater chance of getting the results that you’re hoping for from your users.

Urgency, White Space, and Positioning for Your Call to Action

The importance of the call to action on a website cannot be understated. A call to action is the way to not only get your users to do what you want them to do, but also is a way for you to measure your success and to bring your website further than you’d have dreamed it could go. There are many websites which could have been successful, but weren’t, who could have dramatically changed the outcome by having the right call to action on their site. When it comes to using a call to action, there are a number of ways that you can get your users to pay attention to the site and to do what you want them to do.

Urgency

Language is a powerful tool and, when used in the right way, can help you reach the goal of getting your users to answer to your call to action. When you’re writing your call to action, make sure that you’re very aware of which words you use. There are a number of urgent words that you can utilize to encourage users to take the action that you want them to take, and most of them are action words. These action words clearly tell the user what you would like them to do. They can include words such as register, subscribe, call, buy, and donate.

Once you’ve got the active words, you can create a sense of urgency. Words like “for a short time” and “order now and receive a free gift” all push the user to act swiftly and are a great way to get your call to action answered.

Positioning

Positioning is also very important when it comes to a call to action. If you hide your call to action on the bottom of the page in a corner, your users will likely have a very difficult time seeing it. Ideally it should be placed in the middle column of the page and fairly high, so that the user doesn’t have to scroll down to see what you’d like them to do.

White Space

White noise on the radio is a bad thing, but translated to the written page, it can be really helpful. Some websites have far too much clutter, which causes the users to have a difficult time finding the call to action, or anything else on the page. When you’re trying to get your users to pay attention, try utilizing white space around your call to action to guide the eye to it. The space doesn’t actually have to be white, and can be whatever your background color is. Basically the point is to keep it from being surrounded by content so that users can see it easily.

When we call the field of architecture to mind, we often imagine the slanted desks and precise drawing tools employed by architects to create their distinctive designs. The most central component of the modern concept of architecture, however, lies with the blueprint itself; while those outside of the profession may view it as a kind of incomplete picture, specialists see the blueprint as an all-inclusive whole, describing all the necessary components of a design, upon which a building can be soundly and attractively created. Bringing this concept to the world of web design has been part of the evolution of the human relationship with form and function, and has begun to heavily influence the way we see and use the internet.

The term information architecture itself was first described by architect Richard Saul Wurman in 1975. Wurman saw the potential for data to be carefully and intelligently structured in a manner similar to the foundational elements of a physical structure, and played a key role in bringing this concept to the digital platform. Today, information architecture is a hot topic online and is used for search engine optimization, document creation, and many other applications in the course of developing business and personal interests in the digital medium. As with its use in SEO and documents, information architecture applied to web design is still being developed and experimented with as web designers strive to achieve meaningful results that go beyond the superficial elements of a site’s overt appearance.

Principles of traditional architecture and design are able to transform the way in which information is structured; these principles apply basic concepts central to the crafting of beautiful images and appealing, structurally sound buildings to things such as library and content management systems, online communities based around forums or user groups, and database development. Just as it is essential to quality, dynamic code to build functionality with consistency and an attention to the rules of syntax, the organization and arrangement of websites and their individual elements is served well by approaching projects as though they were physical objects requiring stability and sense.

The effects of information architecture on the developing and evolving scene of online design can be seen around nearly every corner of the web. Like the famous, gleaming bridges that traverse the waterways of Austin Texas, San Francisco California, and New York City, online giants like social media hub Facebook and popular tech blog Engadget rely on sound information architecture to serve traffic with usability and accessibility, not to mention design, that makes sense and which can adapt to changes in the long term. Whether riding with the top down in Austin Tx, coasting along the foggy shores of SFO, or taking in technology at Engadget, some of life’s most pleasant experiences rely on the beauty and reason of a tool we’ve been using for millennia: architecture, a discipline that has grown to transcend the blueprint.

Building a website is often touted as an extraordinarily easy goal, even for the most inexperienced of computer or internet users. The proliferation of special point-and-click site creation tools as well as online guides and physical books are stuffed with information and efforts in explaining the processes involved and helping newcomers achieve a great website. But while website building certainly isn’t impossible or necessarily a difficult field, it can be frustrating and confusing for those just starting out on their own, especially when they have a given result in mind. With all of the glossy and professionally-produced sites on the web today, it can be easy to envision one’s own site taking on the visual and functional qualities of some of the most popular and celebrated addresses on the web. But it can take a fair amount of study or the securing of specialty services to realize such accomplishments.

Building a website in its technical and administrative steps, at least, is fairly straightforward. There are a few processes that site owners must use whether they’re large corporations in Austin Texas or single individual on a deserted island. All sites must have as the basis for their location a domain name, which dictates the dominant part of their URL or website address. Picking a name which is both appropriate, easy to remember, and available for purchase is one of the first steps in building a website, and is followed by purchasing it from a registrar. A website also needs hosting ña space in which to store its data and a server to handle its transfer and site traffic–, which is offered by most registration agencies but can also be purchased off-site. After nameservers have been redirected, if necessary, a site is ready to be populated with content.

It is at this point that a number of new site owners find themselves at a loss for what to do. An important component of building a website, crucial for the Austin Tx corporation equally as much as the single fellow out in the Pacific, is a clear understanding of what the website will contain before content and design creation takes place. A site may incorporate any number of features and capabilities, from simple business descriptions to e-commerce hubs offering online sales, single-author blogs to complex news sites that aggregate fresh information from various online source. Once the idea of purpose is clear, a website owner can begin the construction of their site, either alone or with the help of dedicated professionals.

SEO experts capable of launching a site skyward in rankings and relevance as well as performing other search engine optimization tasks, web designers with successful backgrounds in creating attractive and impressive web design for sites of every nature, and trained programmers with the skill to add fun and function to a site’s structure are all good choices in the procurement of professional website help. Layering content with design and a useful back end, along with any number of special perks and features, can take some time, effort, and money, in various combinations, but is a solid method of achieving a lasting, quality website.