Designing Your Website for Three Main Visitor Types

Designing Your Website for Three Main Visitor Types

When you’re creating content for your website, it’s easy to pack your website valuable information and content. However, showcasing this in a way that’s both informative and engaging to your visitors can be a massive design challenge that many businesses face. DRC Web Design would like to show you how you can cater to all of the main types of visitors on your website.

This will make your business’ website more effective and when you’re planning your new layout, there are three categories your website visitors will fall into: Skimmers, Swimmers and Divers.

These groups of visitors are willing to go progressively deeper into your website’s content and spend more time viewing it. Each of them has a different set of needs that need to be addressed on your website to fulfil their expectations for their online experience.

So, how do you cater your website to address each of these user group’s different needs?

We need to start by understanding what visitors that fall into each of these groups is looking for and think about the opportunities you need to create. Let’s “dive” right in…

Skimmers

The first group is Skimmers, they want to get in, get the information they need from you and get out as soon as they can without dwelling too long on your website. As a result, they will mostly read your website’s headlines and use the titles you have on your website to guide themselves through the various pages and content on your website toward only the information they are looking for.

This is how you can cater to Skimmers:

1. You need to think about what information most people who visit your website will be looking for. This could be things like your opening hours, location, phone number, admission prices or your menu. It is crucial that you make all of these pieces of information impossible to miss. One way to work this out is to check the Google Search Console and Google Analytics data to see what pages your visitors go on and how they get there.
2. You need to make all of the headlines on your website clear and concise, so they stand out when they need to. You can establish a clear hierarchy for the headlines on your website by using different font sizes. This will help make your page structure easy to understand at a glance – perfect for Skimmers.
3. You need to add a search functionality to your website if it doesn’t already have one. Skimmers don’t only rely on headlines for the content they’re looking for, they may fall back on your websites search function if they are struggling to find out what they came to your website for.

Swimmers

The second group is Swimmers, they are willing to dig a little deeper on your website and are interested in the content you are sharing. However, they have a limited amount of time and energy to devote to finding content on your website. If a Swimmer is on your website, they are most likely looking for specific information, but if something else catches their attention they may stick around and read it.

This is how you can cater to Swimmers:

1. You can take influence from how magazines operate and find the most exciting quotes from your content and make them large and colourful so they jump off the page, grabbing the reader’s attention. Using this approach with the content of your website will help make it irresistible to Swimmers who are browsing your website.
2. Obviously, not all your website’s content can be front and centre and viewable immediately, but it shouldn’t be buried under too many layers of navigation either. The most desirable and viewed content should be only one click away maximum.
3. You can feature content that is relevant to what your visitors are currently looking at in context. This is achieved by linking to similar content within the content they are looking at. For example, this could be an informative page about the services your company offers, reviews, testimonials or recommendations about similar products and case studies.

Divers

The third group is Divers, as you can probably tell from their name, they like to dig deep and read all of the information on your website. Typically, they will read most of the content you are sharing, if not all of it and may come back to view future content you publish.

This is how you can cater to Divers:

1. You should start with a logical sitemap that keeps your content organised in an intuitive manner that makes it easy to browse your website. Divers will get frustrated if they are unable to create a make a mental image of your website layout.
2. You should make the progression of your website’s content clear, so they can find a place to stop and come back to later when they have more time.
3. You can enhance the experience of people who are diving into your website by including videos, images and audio to your content wherever possible.

Source: Landslide Creative