TRAFFIC
2016: YEAR OF DESIGN
With many iGaming affiliate website designs largely unchanged since the Millennium, their owners can’t
expect Google to rank them above those that do a better job at addressing those all-important user
experience needs, writes John Wright of UX design specialists Horseshoe Agency, who advises on how
webmasters should be approaching the design process in 2016.
FOR THE LONGEST time there have
been many gambling affiliate websites that
simply looked ugly, but they ranked and
worked. Many of these date from around
the year 2000, when better simply wasn’t
possible, as that was just the state of design
and the internet at the time. Sites were also
fairly one dimensional, in that while you
wer e able to read the content, there was
no interaction via mediums such as social
media and the industry has yet to start the
move to mobile.
These sites, particularly in gambling,
may have looked like terrible banner farms,
but worked for a while! However, without
naming and shaming anyone, some of
these are still hanging around with the
same design and layout without so much of
an update, with many dropping out of the
rankings altogether.
If you are a serious webmaster and want
to compete these days in the gambling
affiliate business, you should always
be paying attention to the changes in
technology as well as trends in design.
If your website design and layout is five
years old or or even older than this, then
you should be seriously considering a new
design, as this could and should improve
all of the metrics that matter to any
webmaster, including conversion rate, time
on site, and number of page visits per user,
to give but a few examples.
Demographics are also a factor to
consider here, as about half the world’s
population is under 30, and those aged
between 20-30 have grown up with the
internet, are plugged into social media
and spend a huge amount of time on their
mobile phones. They probably couldn’t
possibly relate to or navigate an archaiclooking website, so if the site isn’t modern
from a design and possibly from a coding
perspective you could be losing out on
returning customers.
The twin pillars of website design
There are two important topics to focus
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iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016
on when it comes to a website design: user
experience design (UX) and conversion rate
optimization (CRO). A few years ago the
buzzword in the design community was
responsive design, but this is now standard;
your site should always work in mobile.
If you are having a website designed from
scratch or are using any type of template,
if you focus on addressing one of these
elements, you’ll take care of the other
most of the time. That is, if you design a
site incorporating user experience into the
whole design, you’ll have done most of
the work needed to address conversion
issues, and vice versa. So if you had to hire
someone to do either UX or CRO, I’d say
you can’t go wrong as long as you have
hired someone who’s talented and knows
what they are doing. In a perfect world,
you would have the budget to have both
of these types of people and skill-sets on
your team.
Website design companies
There are tons of design agencies
everywhere that will do your website for
you, ranging from very cheap to extremely
expensive. My opinion is that 90% of
these companies don’t know what they
are doing when it comes to gaming. Sure,
they can design an aesthetically pleasing
website, but that doesn’t mean they have
the requisite experience in online marketing
and it’s also not their job to ensure your
new website converts. You should ask any
website design company you are thinking
of working with if they know what A/B
split testing is or if they are familiar with
CRO or UX/UI. If not, they are effectively
just your next billing agency - they’ll come
up with their quote and present you with a
document full of terms and jargon designed
to impress – and confuse – you, with those
features costing you extra when often they
should be standard.
Here’s a list of questions to ask your
website designer or design agency:
●●Will your designs help me improve my
sales and conversion rate?
your designs load fast and what
techniques do you use to help improve
site speed?
●●Can I contact your previous clients to see
if they are happy with their designs?
●●Will
What’s the difference between a
website designer and UX designer?
It is fairly substantial, so much so that
user experience (UX) designers will make
a point of emphasizing that they do UX
and UI, and will go to lengths to explain
how they differ from the average website
designer. A good UX designer will want
to know more about your customers; what
they expect, the ways they’ll land on your
site, and what you will want the users to
do next. Your regular website designer
might not ask these questions, but will ask
enough in order to be able to put together
something that looks good on paper and
states that they’ll be happy to design things
the way you want.
The problem for new webmasters
approaching these agencies with their
design brief is twofold: they don’t know
what will convert and sell, and they hope
that a design company will naturally
address that for them, often being
convinced that if a design looks good, it
will convert and work, when this simply
isn’t the case. In some cases, I’ve seen sites
actually drop in performance following a
redesign, and the agency has not been able
to offer an explanation.
The website design company will
always be around, while others will evolve
with UX, conversion optimization and
working with the latest technologies and
design trends.
Who hires UX designers?
Only the biggest websites in the world, and
to be clear, they want UX designers not
website designers. These companies include
Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Twitter
and more.